The role of dissipation and defect energy in variational formulations of problems in strain-gradient plasticity. Part 1: polycrystalline plasticity

A general set of flow laws and associated variational formulations are constructed for small-deformation rate-independent problems in strain-gradient plasticity. The framework is based on the thermodynamically consistent theory due to Gurtin and Anand (J Mech Phys Solids 53: 1624-1649, 2005), and includes as variables a set of microstresses which have both energetic and dissipative components. The flow law is of associative type. It is expressed as a normality law with respect to a convex but otherwise arbitrary yield function, or equivalently in terms of the corresponding dissipation function. Two cases studied are, first, an extension of the classical Hill-Mises or J(2) flow law and second, a form written as a linear sum of the magnitudes of the plastic strain and strain gradient. This latter form is motivated by work of Evans and Hutchinson (Acta Mater 57:1675-1688, 2009) and Nix and Gao (J Mech Phys Solids 46:411-425, 1998), who show that it leads to superior correspondence with experimental results, at least for particular classes of problems. The corresponding yield function is obtained by a duality argument. The variational problem is based on the flow rule expressed in terms of the dissipation function, and the problem is formulated as a variational inequality in the displacement, plastic strain, and hardening parameter. Dissipative components of the microstresses, which are indeterminate, are absent from the formulation. Existence and uniqueness of solutions are investigated for the generalized Hill-Mises and linear-sum dissipation functions, and for various combinations of defect energy. The conditions for well-posedness of the problem depend critically on the choice of dissipation function, and on the presence or otherwise of a defect energy in the plastic strain or plastic strain gradient, and of internal-variable hardening.