A Ductile Damage Nonlocal Model of Integral-type at Finite Strains: Formulation and Numerical Issues

This contribution is devoted to the formulation and numerical implementation of a ductile damage constitutive model enriched with a thermodynamically consistent nonlocal theory of integral type. In order to describe ductile deformation, the model takes finite strains into account. To model elasticity, a Hencky-like hyperelastic free energy potential coupled with nonlocal damage is adopted. The thermodynamic consistency of the model is ensured by applying the first and second thermodynamical principles in the global form and the dissipation inequality can be re-written in a local form by incorporating a nonlocal residual that accounts for energy exchanges between material points of the nonlocal medium. The thermodynamically consistent nonlocal model is compared with its associated classical formulation (in which nonlocality is merely incorporated by averaging the damage variable without resorting to thermodynamic potentials) where the thermodynamical admissibility of the classical formulation is demonstrated. Within the computational scheme, the nonlocal constitutive initial boundary value problem is discretized over pseudo-time where it is shown that well established numerical integration strategies can be straightforwardly extended to the nonlocal integral formulation. A modified Newton-Raphson solution strategy is adopted to solve the nonlinear complementarity problem and its numerical implementation, regarding the proposed nonlocal constitutive model, is presented in detail. The results of two-dimensional finite element analyses show that the model is able to eliminate the pathological mesh dependence inherently present under the softening regime if the local theory is considered.