Viscoplastic self-consistent formulation as generalized material model for solid mechanics applications

Abstract The viscoplastic self-consistent (VPSC) formulation is extended into a generalized material model/code (VPSC-GMM) that can be easily called by different explicit and implicit boundary-value problem solvers, including high-performance parallel computing implementations. To that end, necessary numerical, algorithmic and programming improvements to the baseline VPSC formulation were developed, and are thoroughly presented in this work. The novel VPSC-GMM is coupled with a Lagrangian finite element (FE) hydrodynamics code, and validated by comparison with stand-alone VPSC predictions for one-element simulations of uniaxial compression and tension and simple shear. Finally, VPSC-GMM coupled with the hydrodynamics FE code is applied to simulate Taylor impact of a polycrystalline tantalum Taylor cylinder. Good agreement between the predicted deformed cylinder shape and the experimental measurement is observed. In terms of parallel computing performance, linear scaling of the computational time with the number of threads is observed.