Dynamic strain localization in elasto-(visco-)plastic solids, Part 1. General formulation and one-dimensional examples

Viscoplasticity is introduced as a procedure to regularize the elasto-plastic solid, especially for those situations in which the underlying inviscid material exhibits instabilities which preclude further analysis of initial-value problems. The procedure is general, and therefore has the advantage of allowing the regularization of any inviscid elastic-plastic material. Rate-dependency is shown to naturally introduce a length-scale into the dynamical initial-value problem. Furthermore, the width of the localized zones in which high strain gradients prevail and strain accumulations take place, is shown to be proportional to the characteristic length cη, which is the distance the elastic wave travels in the characteristic time η. Viscosity can thus be viewed either as a regularization parameter (computational point of view), or as a substructural/micromechanical parameter to be determined from observed shear-band widths (physical point of view). Finally, from a computational point of view, the proposed approach is shown to have striking advantages: (1) the wave speeds always remain real (even in the softening regime) and are set by the elastic moduli; (2) the elasto-(visco-)plastic constitutive equations are amenable to unconditionally stable integration; (3) the resulting well-posedness of the dynamical initial-value problem guarantees stable and convergent solutions with mesh refinements. The initial-value problems reported in this first part are essentially one-dimensional. They are used because they offer the simplest possible context to illustrate both the physical and computational significance of the proposed viscoplastic regularization procedure. The methods used in multi-dimensional analysis and examples will be reported in Part 2.