An evolving effective stress approach to anisotropic distortional hardening

A new yield surface with an evolving effective stress definition is proposed for consistently and efficiently describing anisotropic distortional hardening. Specifically, a new internal state variable is introduced to capture the thermodynamic evolution between different effective stress definitions. The corresponding yield surface and evolution equations of the internal variables are derived from thermodynamic considerations enabling satisfaction of the second law. A closest point projection return mapping algorithm for the proposed model is formulated and implemented for use in finite element analyses. Select constitutive and larger scale boundary value problems are solved to explore the capabilities of the model and examine the impact of distortional hardening on constitutive and structural responses. Importantly, these simulations demonstrate the tractability of the proposed formulation in investigating large-scale problems of interest. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.