Analysis of adiabatic shear bands in heat-conducting elastothermoviscoplastic materials by the meshless local Bubnov-Galerkin method

Transient finite coupled thermomechanical simple shearing deformations of a block made of an elastothermoviscoplastic material that exhibits strain and strain-rate hardening, and thermal softening are studied by using the meshless local Bubnov–Galerkin method. A local nonlinear weak formulation and a semidiscrete formulation of the problem are derived. The prescribed velocity at the top and the bottom surfaces of the block is enforced by using a set of Lagrange multipliers. A homogeneous solution of the problem is perturbed by superimposing on it a temperature bump at the center of the block, and the resulting nonlinear initial-boundary-value problem is solved numerically. We have developed an integration scheme to numerically integrate the set of coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations. The inhomogeneous deformations of the block are found to concentrate in a narrow region of intense plastic deformation usually called a shear band. For a material exhibiting enhanced thermal softening, it is shown that as the shear stress within the region of localization collapses, an unloading elastic shear wave emanates outward from the edges of the shear band. In the absence of an analytical solution, the computed results have been compared with those obtained by the finite element and the modified smoothed particle hydrodynamics methods. Copyright q 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.