Continuum damage mechanics modelling incorporating stress triaxiality effect on ductile damage initiation

Micromechanical modelling of void nucleation in ductile metals indicates that strain required for damage initiation reduces exponentially with increasing stress triaxiality. This feature has been incorporated in a continuum damage mechanics (CDM) model, providing a phenomenological relationship for the damage threshold strain dependence on the stress triaxiality. The main consequences of this model modification are that the failure locus is predicted to change as function of stress triaxiality sensitivity of the material damage threshold strain and that high triaxial fracture strain is expected to be even lower than the threshold strain at which the damage processes initiate at triaxiality as low as 1/3. The proposed damage model formulation has been used to predict ductile fracture in unnotched and notched bars in tension for two commercially pure alpha-iron grades (Swedish and ARMCO iron). Finally, the model has been validated, predicting spall fracture in a plate-impact experiment and confirming the capability to capture the effect of the stress state on material fracture ductility at very high stress triaxiality.