Identification methodology and comparison of phenomenological ductile damage models via hybrid numerical–experimental analysis of fracture experiments conducted on a zirconium alloy

The present study details the methodology of the identification process of uncoupled damage formulations proposed by Bai and Wierzbicki (B&W model – Bai and Wierzbicki (2008) and Modified Mohr–Coulomb – Bai and Wierzbicki (2010)) as well as the Lemaitre and enhanced Lemaitre coupled damage models. These uncoupled models were first implemented in the Finite Element (FE) software Forge2009®, then their parameters identifications were carried out. These identifications involve two steps: identification of hardening law parameters and identification of damage parameters. In the first step, the method to obtain the coefficient of a non-linear friction law in compression test is also presented. The second step differs between the above-mentioned models: the identification of uncoupled models is carried out through the experimental fracture strains of different loading paths, while the identification of Lemaitre’s model is based on the softening effect of damage. The latter model is enhanced by accounting for the influence of the Lode parameter to improve its ability to predict fracture in shear loading. The results show that, among the studied models, the proposed enhanced Lemaitre model gives overall best results in terms of fracture prediction for all the tests. The proportionality of studied loading paths is also discussed. It is shown that the compression is not suitable to identify the parameters of the studied uncoupled damage models.