NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF GROWING THE DUCTILE DAMAGE IN STRUCTURES REINFORCED BY SMA USING CONTINUUM DAMAGE MECHANICS APPROACH

In general, materials include micro-cracks and small holes which is created during the manufacturing process. The growth of these micro-cracks leads to degradation of mechanical properties and resulting in deterioration of the materials. Continuum damage mechanics is the new field of failure criteria which survey the behavior and responses of weakened material during the complete process of deterioration of material. This method defines the damage growth with an internal variable and can be used to predict the failure behavior of many materials such as metals, composites, polymers, and so on. Shape memory alloys have unique features, such as, having memorable properties, being super elastic and being energy absorber, which led to new applications in science and engineering research. Super elastic property accompanies with a lot of energy absorption during creating a Hysteresis loop. In this research, we examine mechanical behavior of materials reinforced with smart alloy in the context of environmental damage mechanics. Simulation and experimental results were very close. The considered structure is a notched piece of aluminum which is reinforced by the smart alloy. This material is notched because when the smart alloy reaches to its maximum reversible strain, damage variable reaches to its critical value due to the stress concentration. Accordingly, in this case, the effect of existence of the smart alloy is studied to find how it reduces the growing of the damage. Simulation of the mentioned structure is performed with Finite Element Analysis, where the structure was modeled under longitudinal loading. UMAT code of Lemaiter model, was developed for behavioral properties with damaged aluminum, UMAT code of Brinson model was used for behavioral properties of shape memory alloy. Simulation results suggest that different behavioral aluminum with aluminum reinforced by SMA. Existence of smart alloy on the aluminum substrate reduces the damage evolution and the structure fails in higher loadings. Also, the simulation results showed that reinforcing materials such as aluminum with shape memory alloys, up to the failure, are suitable choices for cyclic loading.