INFLUENCE OF NONCLASSICAL ELASTIC PLASTIC CONSTITUTIVE FEATURES ON SHOCK-WAVE EXISTENCE AND SPECTRAL SOLUTIONS

THE INFLUENCE of non-classical elastic-plastic constitutive features on dynamically moving discontinuities in stress, strain and material velocity is investigated. Non-classical behavior here includes non-normality of the plastic strain increment to the yield surface, plastic compressibility, pressure sensitivity of yield and dependence of the elastic moduli on plastic strain. DRUGAN and SHEN'S (1987) analysis of dynamically moving discontinuities with strain as well as stress jumps in classical materials is shown to be valid for a broad class of non-associative material models until deviation from normality exceeds a critical (non-infinitesimal) level. For these non-classical materials, an inequality that bounds the magnitude of the stress jump is derived, which is information not obtainable from a standard spectral analysis of a shock. For the special case of stress discontinuities with continuous strain or for quasi-static deformations, this inequality is shown to rule out jumps in specific projections of the stress tensor unless the non-normality is sufficiently large. These results invalidate a recent claim in the literature that an infinitesimal amount of non-normality permits moving surfaces of discontinuity in stress (with no strain jump) near the tip of a dynamically advancing crack tip. Using a very general plastic constitutive law that subsumes most non-classical (and classical) descriptions currently in use, a complete closed form solution is obtained for the plastic wave speeds and eigenvectors. A novel feature of the analysis is the clarity and completeness of the solutions. If the elastic part of the response is isotropic, one plastic wave speed equals the elastic shear wave speed, while the other two possible wave speeds depend in general on the stress and plastic strain within the shock transition layer. Concise necessary and sufficient conditions for real eigenvalues and for vanishing eigenvalues are derived. The real eigenvalues are classified by numerical sign and ordering relative to the elastic eigenvalues. The geometric multiplicity of plastic eigenvectors associated with elastic eigenvalues is shown to depend on the stress state within the shock transition layer. These solutions, several of which hold for arbitrary elastic anisotropy, are also applicable to acceleration waves and localization problems and to materials with dependence of the elastic moduli on plastic strain. Such elastic plastic coupling is shown to imply a non-self-adjoint fourth order tangent stiffness tensor even if the plastic constitutive law is associative.