Plasticity-Induced Heating: Revisiting the Energy-Based Variational Model

Area of Science:

• Materials Science
• Mechanical Engineering
• Computational Mechanics

Background:

• Understanding temperature changes during plastic deformation is crucial for manufacturing process design and predicting tool wear.
• Existing experimental and numerical research often yields contradictory results regarding plasticity-induced heating.
• Accurate estimation of thermo-mechanical coupling is essential for reliable simulations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze methods for estimating plasticity-induced heating directly from displacement fields.
• To propose an alternative computational approach for modeling thermo-mechanical behavior.
• To improve the accuracy of predicting temperature evolution during plastic deformation.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of an energy-based variational formulation for coupled thermo-mechanical problems.
• Development of an alternative purely thermal finite element simulation approach.
• Incorporation of thermo-visco-plastic constitutive behavior (Johnson-Cook model).
• Utilizing a heat source term based on the Taylor-Quinney coefficient to represent the fraction of plastic work converted to heat.

Main Results:

• The proposed alternative method provides a practical approach for estimating plasticity-induced heating from displacement data.
• The method integrates strain and strain rate data with a thermodynamically motivated model for heat conversion.
• This approach offers a more consistent and reliable way to analyze temperature evolution compared to some existing methods.

Conclusions:

• The developed finite element simulation method effectively estimates plasticity-induced heating using displacement fields.
• This work contributes to more accurate modeling of thermo-mechanical phenomena in materials processing.
• The findings can aid in optimizing manufacturing processes and enhancing tool wear prediction.