A Gurson-type criterion for porous ductile solids containing arbitrary ellipsoidal voids—I: Limit-analysis of some representative cell

Gurson (1977)'s famous model of the behavior of porous ductile solids, initially developed for spherical cavities, was extended by Gologanu et al., 1993, Gologanu et al., 1994 and Gologanu et al., 1997 to spheroidal, both prolate and oblate voids. The aim of this work is to further extend it to general (non-spheroidal) ellipsoidal cavities, through approximate homogenization of some representative elementary porous cell. As a first step, we perform in the present Part I a limit-analysis of such a cell, namely an ellipsoidal volume made of some rigid-ideal-plastic von Mises material and containing a confocal ellipsoidal void, loaded arbitrarily under conditions of homogeneous boundary strain rate. This analysis provides an estimate of the overall plastic dissipation based on a family of trial incompressible velocity fields recently discovered by Leblond and Gologanu (2008), satisfying conditions of homogeneous strain rate on all ellipsoids confocal with the void and the outer boundary. The asymptotic behavior of the integrand in the expression of the global plastic dissipation is studied both far from and close to the void. The results obtained suggest approximations leading to explicit approximate expressions of the overall dissipation and yield function. These expressions contain parameters the full determination of which will be the object of Part II.