Fracture models for elasto-plastic materials as limits of gradient damage models coupled with plasticity: the antiplane case

We study the asymptotic behavior of a variational model for damaged elasto-plastic materials in the case of antiplane shear. The energy functionals we consider depend on a small parameter epsilon, which forces damage concentration on regions of codimension one. We determine the Gamma-limit as epsilon tends to zero and show that it contains an energy term involving the crack opening.