Underlying material response for Luders-like instabilities

The initial yielding of some low carbon steels exhibits a material instability known as Luders banding. This is a dislocation driven phenomenon that macroscopically manifests as inhomogeneous deformation. For example, in a displacement controlled uniaxial test Luders banding leads to coexistence of two deformation regimes while the stress remains relatively unchanged. Shape memory alloys whose behavior is governed by solid-solid phase transformations, in some temperature regimes exhibit similar localizations albeit reversible. Such localizations have undesirable consequences in structural applications such as stretch marks and structural instabilities. Modeling of this behavior in order to assess its consequences in structures is hampered because the true material response over the stress plateau is unknown. This work used an experimental technique, outlined in Shioya and Shiroiri (1976) that extracts the underlying material response of such materials from a tensile test. Laminates consisting of face-strips of a hardening material and an unstable core, if properly designed, can suppress the inhomogeneous deformation of the core resulting in a monotonically increasing response. This method revealed that both steel and NiTi strips have up-down-up responses. The extracted responses incorporated in finite element models are shown to reproduce both the laminate experiments and the behavior of strips made of unstable materials alone. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.