An Advanced Energy Relaxation Scheme for the Modeling of Displacive Phase Transformations Available to Purchase

In this contribution, a micro-mechanically motivated constitutive model for phase transformation, martensite reorientation and twin formation in shape memory alloys is proposed. The formulation builds on an effective parametrization of the austenite-twinned martensite microstructure through first- and second-order laminates. To define the effective energy density of the phase mixture, the concept of energy relaxation is applied. The values of the dissipative internal state variables that describe the microstructure evolution are computed via constrained incremental energy minimization. This work also suggests a first step towards the continuous modeling of twin formation embedded into the concept of energy relaxation and can be viewed as a generalization of earlier models suggested in [1–3]. More specifically, in the current model the orientation of martensitic variants in space is not pre-assigned. Variants are rather left free to arrange in an energy-minimizing fashion and are only distinguished by their rotation in reference to a master variant. Finally, macro-homogeneous uniaxial strain and pure shear loading cases are analyzed to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed modeling framework.