The effect of random voids in the modified Gurson model

The porous plasticity model (usually referred to as the Gurson-Tvergaard-Needleman model or modified Gurson model) has been widely used in the study of microvoid-induced ductile fracture. In this paper, we studied the effects of random voids on the porous plasticity model. Finite-element simulations were conducted to study a copper/tin/copper joint bar under uniaxial tension using the commercial finite-element package ABAQUS. A randomly distributed initial void volume fraction with different types of distribution was introduced, and the effects of this randomness on the crack path and macroscopic stress-strain behavior were studied. It was found that consideration of the random voids is able to capture more detailed and localized deformation features, such as different crack paths and different ultimate tensile strengths, and meanwhile does not change the macroscopic stress-strain behavior. It seems that the random voids are able to qualitatively explain the scattered observations in experiments while keeping the macroscopic measurements consistent.