Large strain elasto-plasticity for diffuse interface models

Most solid-state phase transformations are accompanied by large deformations, stemming either from external load, transformation strains or plasticity. The consideration of such large deformations will affect the numerical treatment of such transformations. In this paper, we present a new scheme to embed large deformations in an explicit phase-field scheme and its implementation in the open-source framework OpenPhase. The suggested scheme combines the advantages of a spectral solver to calculate the mechanical boundary value problem in a small strain limit and an advection procedure to transport field variables over the calculation grid. Since the developed approach should be used for various sets of problems, e.g. simulations of thermodynamically driven phase transformations, the mechanic formulation is kept general. However, to ensure compatibility with phase-field methods using the concept of diffuse interface, the latter is treated with special care in the present work.