Calibration of Hardening Rules for Cyclic Plasticity

In the realm of multi-axial ratcheting, a step by step mathematical approach is developed for the parameter determination of decomposed kinematic hardening rules. For this purpose, key characteristics are mathematically derived for these hardening rules under multi-axial loading. These characteristics are then utilized to develop expressions which relate the loading history to the accumulated plastic strain. Unlike the calibration techniques available in the literature, this new method does not include trail and error analyses to fit the simulation results to the experimental data. The proposed method is illustrated through a numerical example. The results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, but also indicate that simple hardening rules, if calibrated accordingly, can be much more efficient than what has been shown before.