Towards Phase Field Modeling of Ductile Fracture in Gradient‐Extended Elastic‐Plastic Solids

The modeling of failure in ductile metals must account for complex phenomena at a micro‐scale as well as the final rupture at the macro‐scale. Within a top‐down viewpoint, this can be achieved by the combination of a micro‐structure‐informed elastic‐plastic model with a concept for the modeling of macroscopic crack discontinuities. In this context, it is important to account for material length scales and thermo‐mechanical coupling effects due to dissipative heating. This can be achieved by the construction of non‐standard, gradient‐enhanced models of plasticity with a full embedding into continuum thermodynamics [1,2]. The modeling of macroscopic cracks can be achieved in a convenient way by recently developed continuum phase field approaches to fracture based on regularized crack discontinuities. This avoids the use of complex discretization methods for crack discontinuities, and can account for complex crack patterns within a pure continuum formulation. Moreover, the phase field modeling of fracture is related to gradient theories of continuum damage mechanics, and fits nicely the structure of constitutive models for gradient plasticity. The main focus of this work is the extensions to gradient thermoplasticity and phase field formulation of ductile fracture, conceptually in line with the work [3]. (© 2014 Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)