Variational updates for thermomechanically coupled gradient-enhanced elastoplasticity - Implementation based on hyper-dual numbers

This paper deals with the implementation of thermomechanically coupled gradient-enhanced elastoplasticity at finite strains. The presented algorithmic formulation heavily relies on the variational structure of the considered initial boundary value problem. Consequently, such a variational structure is elaborated. While variational formulations are well-known in the case of isothermal plasticity theory, thermomechanically coupled gradient-enhanced plasticity theory has not been considered before. The resulting time-continuous variational principle allows the computation of all unknown variables jointly and naturally from the stationarity condition of an incremental potential. By discretization of this time-continuous potential in time, a discrete approximation is obtained which represents the foundation of the algorithmic formulation. As a matter of fact, stationarity of the respective potential again defines all unknown variables - now in a time-discrete fashion. Within this paper, the necessary condition associated with stationarity - a vanishing first gradient - is solved numerically by means of Newton's method. Hence, the first as well as the second derivatives of the incremental potential are required. They are computed by numerical differentiation based on hyper-dual numbers. By considering a perturbation with respect to hyper-dual numbers, the first as well as the second derivatives are computed in an exact manner without introducing any numerical errors. Although numerical differentiation based on hyper-dual numbers is numerically more extensive than real-valued perturbations, it is shown that the scalability of the resulting parallel finite element implementation is not dominated by this effect for sufficiently large problems.