Effect of stress-state and spacing on voids in a shear-field

Unit cell model analyses are carried out for a material with a periodic array of voids, subject to shear loading. Thus the focus is on ductile fracture in conditions of low stress triaxiality. It has been shown recently that voids in shear are flattened out to micro-cracks, which rotate and elongate until interaction with neighboring micro-cracks gives coalescence, so that the failure mechanism is very different from that under tensile loading.

In the present studies the plane strain unit cell has fully periodic boundary conditions, so that any combination of the stress components in the overall average stress state can be prescribed. This also allows for studies of the effect of different initial void spacing in the two in-plane coordinate directions.

The stress states considered are essentially simple shear, with various levels of tensile stresses or compressive stresses superposed, i.e. low positive stress triaxiality or even negative stress triaxiality. For high aspect ratio unit cells a clear localization band is found inside the cell, which actually represents several parallel bands, due to periodicity.

In the materials represented by a low aspect ratio unit cell localization would also occur after that the maximum shear stress has been passed, but this is not shown when periodicity is enforced. The effect of superposed tensile or compressive stresses is found to be bigger for high aspect ratio unit cells than for low aspect ratios.