A gradient-enhanced damage model motivated by engineering approaches to ductile failure of steels

Material models for ductile damage, crack initiation, and crack growth are of high interest, e.g. for metal forming simulations. Empirical engineering approaches are often applied, but the numerical results are sensitive to the discretization if no method is utilized to prevent ill-posedness of the underlying boundary value problem due to strain softening. In order to face this issue, an empirical damage model is equipped with a gradient-enhancement which introduces an additional length scale parameter. Until the initiation of damage, the material is modeled with standard von Mises plasticity. Damage initiation is taken into account by an uncoupled failure indicator. After damage initiation, material degradation is assumed to be driven by a non-local quantity, which depends on plastic deformation and stress triaxiality. During damage evolution, the macroscopic material behavior becomes dependent on hydrostatic stress, which is motivated by well known void growth and coalescence mechanisms. A calibration strategy is developed to determine the parameters of strain hardening, damage initiation, and damage evolution as well as the internal length step-by-step. The proposed model is calibrated to experimental data of a pressure vessel steel. Reasonable predictions of smooth and notched tensile tests as well as a small punch test show the validity of the model for loadings from moderate to high stress triaxialities.