Morphological study of elastic-plastic-brittle transitions in disordered media

We use a spring lattice model with springs following a bilinear elastoplastic-brittle constitutive behavior with spatial disorder in the yield and failure thresholds to study patterns of plasticity and damage evolution. The elastic-perfectly plastic transition is observed to follow percolation scaling with the correlation length critical exponent ν≈1.59, implying the universality class corresponding to the long-range correlated percolation. A quantitative analysis of the plastic strain accumulation reveals a dipolar anisotropy (for antiplane loading) which vanishes with increasing hardening modulus. A parametric study with hardening modulus and ductility controlled through the spring level constitutive response demonstrates a wide spectrum of behaviors with varying degree of coupling between plasticity and damage evolution.