Overall behaviour of heterogeneous elastoviscoplastic materials: effect of microstructural modelling

Homogenisation methods provide an efficient way to model the mechanical behaviour of heterogeneous materials. In this paper, a homogenisation procedure is adopted that allows to determine apparent properties for Perzyna's elastoviscoplastic constitutive law for arbitrary microstructures. Numerical simulations on a representative volume element (RVE) are performed, from which the volume averaged state variables are acquired, necessary to establish the constitutive equations for the equivalent homogeneous medium. The applicability of mixed and periodic boundary conditions has been assessed. In addition, the difference between uniform and irregular distributions of the microstructural constituents is discussed. To substantiate our findings, a comparison is made between the global response of a heterogeneous and the corresponding homogenised structure. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.