Recent Developments on Thermo-Mechanical Simulations of Ductile Failure by Meshfree Method

Ductile failure is a complex multi-scale phenomenon evolved from the micro-voids to macro-crack. There are three main failure mechanisms behinds a ductile failure: adiabatic shear band (ASB), spall fracture, and crack. Since this type of thermo-mechanical phenomena involves large deformation and large scale plastic yielding, a meshfree method has intrinsic advantages in solving this kind of problems over the conventional finite element method. In this paper, the numerical methodologies including multi-physics approach for ASB, parametric visibility condition for crack propagation, and multi-scale approach to determine spall strength in simulating ductile failure have been reviewed. A thermo-mechanical coupling algorithm is proposed to incorporate reproducing kernel particle method (RPKM) with rate dependent Johnson-Cook model. Numerical simulations demonstrate that this meshfree method can capture the essential features of a ductile failure.