A finite strain plastic-damage model for high velocity impact using combined viscosity and gradient localization limiters: Part I - Theoretical formulation

During dynamic loading processes, large inelastic deformation associated with high strain rates leads, for a broad class of ductile metals, to degradation and failure by strain localization. However, as soon as material failure dominates a deformation process, the material increasingly displays strain softening and the finite element computations are considerably affected by the mesh size and alignment. This gives rise to a non-physical description of the localized regions. This article presents a theoretical framework to solve this problem with the aid of nonlocal gradient-enhanced theory coupled to viscoinelasticity. Constitutive equations for anisotropic thermoviscodamage (rate-dependent damage) mechanism coupled with thermo-hypoelasto-viscoplastic deformation are developed in this work within the framework of thermodynamic laws, nonlinear continuum mechanics, and nonlocal continua. Explicit and implicit microstructural length-scale measures, which preserve the well-posedness of the differential equations, are introduced through the use of the viscosity and gradient localization limiters. The gradient-enhanced theory that incorporates macroscale interstate variables and their high-order gradients is developed here to describe the change in the internal structure and to investigate the size effect of statistical inhomogeneity of the evolution related plasticity and damage. The gradients are introduced in the hardening internal state variables and are considered dependent on their local counterparts. The derived microdamage constitutive model is destined to be applied in the context of high velocity impact and penetration damage mechanics. The theoretical framework presented in this article can be considered as a feasible thermodynamic approach that enables to derive various gradient (visco) plasticity/(visco) damage theories by introducing simplifying assumptions. Besides the clear physical significance of the proposed framework, it also defines a very convenient context for the efficient numerical integration of the resulting constitutive equations. This aspect is explored in Part II of this work and the application of the framework proposed herein to the numerical simulation of high velocity impacts on metal plates.