Dynamic response of ductile materials containing cylindrical voids

The fracture of ductile materials is often the result of the nucleation, growth and coalescence of microscopic voids. In this thesis, we mainly focus on the dynamic void evolution in porous media containing cylindrical voids. This study covers a problem that is of particular interest in many areas of research (e.g. development of shock mitigation devices for civil or military applications). Owing to the development of additive manufacturing, the processing of porous material with cylindrical voids is an option to create lightweight materials having interesting properties in terms of energy dissipation. Therefore, our work aims at describing the dynamic response of architectured materials such as honeycomb structures. In dynamic loading, microvoids sustain an extremely rapid expansion which generates strong acceleration of particles in the vicinity of cavities. These micro-inertia effects are known to play a significant role in the macroscopic response and the development of damage in porous media. In fact, the overall macroscopic stress is found to be the sum of two contributions: a static term (micro-inertia independent term) and a dynamic term (micro-inertia dependent term), the latter being related to the microstructure (e.g. size and aspect ratio of voids). In our work, a cylindrical shell is adopted as a Representative Volume Element (internal and external radii a and b, length 2l) for the porous material. The static term is derived from a yield function available in the literature. The dynamic stress is evaluated analytically using a trial velocity field for cylindrical voids combined with the multi-scale approach developed in the literature in LEM3. It is shown that the dynamic stress is scaled by the mass density, two characteristic lengths of the voids, the porosity, the macroscopic strain rate tensor and the time derivative of the strain rate tensor. An important outcome of the model is the differential lengthscale effect which exists between in-plane and out of plane components of the macroscopic stress. Namely, it is observed for axisymmetric loading that in-plane dynamic stress components are only related to the void radius a while the out of plane stress component is linked to a and the length of the RVE, l. In the thesis, we present the dynamic response of the porous medium when subjected to various loading conditions: spherical loading, axisymmetric plane strain loading, uniaxial loading and biaxial loading. While for plane strain loading under quasi static condition, the overall axial stress is spherical, in dynamic conditions, the inertia contribution hinders the overall stress tensor from being spherical. Another important result of the proposed theory is the effect of the void length, which does not exist in quasi static conditions where the overall response is solely modulated by the porosity. The case of thin cylinders under dynamic loading reveals a peculiar damage kinetics. In fact, the damage developed in such porous materials results from an increase of the void radius and a reduction of the external radius. The void collapse for uniaxial as well as for biaxial loadings are new observations. The analytical model predictions are validated based on comparisons with finite element calculations (Abaqus/Explicit).