On kinematic, thermodynamic, and kinetic coupling of a damage theory for polycrystalline material

The paper proposes a new consistent formulation of polycrystalline finite-strain elasto-plasticity coupling kinematics and thermodynamics with damage using an extended multiplicative decomposition of the deformation gradient that accounts for temperature effects. The macroscopic deformation gradient comprises four terms. thermal deformation associated with the thermal expansion, the deviatoric plastic deformation attributed to the history of dislocation glide/movement, the volumetric deformation gradient associated with dissipative volume change of the material, and the elastic or recoverable deformation associated with the lattice rotation/stretch. Such a macroscopic decomposition of the deformation gradient is physically motivated by the mechanisms underlying lattice deformation, plastic flow, and evolution of damage in polycrystalline materials It is shown that prescribing plasticity and damage evolution equations in their physical intermediate configurations leads to physically justified evolution equations in the current configuration. In the past, these equations have been modified in order to represent experimentally observed behavior with regard to damage evolution, whereas in this paper, these modifications appear naturally through mappings by the multiplicative decomposition of the deformation gradient. The prescribed kinematics captures precisely the damage deformation (of any rank) and does not require introducing a fictitious undamaged configuration or mechanically equivalent of the real damaged configuration as used in the past. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.