Comparison of isotropic hardening and kinematic hardening in thermoplasticity

A coupled thermo-mechanical problem is presented in this paper. The constitutive model is based on thermoplastic model for large strains where both kinematic and isotropic hardening are included. It is shown that a non-associated plasticity formulation enables thermodynamic consistent heat generation to be modeled, which can be fitted accurately to experimental data. In the numerical examples the effect of heat generation is investigated and both thermal softening and temperature-dependent thermal material parameters are considered. The constitutive model is formulated such that pure isotropic and pure kinematic hardening yield identical uniaxial mechanical response and mechanical dissipation. Thus, differences in response due to hardening during non-proportional loading can be studied. Thermally triggered necking is studied, as well as cyclic loading of Cook’s membrane. The numerical examples are solved using the finite element method, and the coupled problem that arises is solved using a staggered method where an isothermal split is adopted.