A novel damage variable to characterize evolution of microstructure with plastic deformation for ductile metal materials under tensile loading

Damage and fracture of ductile metal materials are greatly associated with evolution of their microstructure under loading, which meso-dimensionally corresponds to grain deformation as well as nucleation, growth, and coalescence of microvoids in later local deformation. The evolution behavior of microstructure is important to realize ductile damage and fracture mechanism of materials. In the present work, a novel damage variable of shape factor of grains was put forward to quantitatively describe the character of microstructure; its evolution with the plastic deformation was built-up by microanalytical and mechanical experiments for Armco iron and mild steel tensile bars. The evolution rule based on the damage variable of shape factor is possible to be extended into all of ductile metal materials.