FE approach for thermodynamically consistent gradient-dependent plasticity

in this work a dual-mixed fe-formulation for thermodynamically consistent gradient-dependent plasticity is proposed which leads to a fixed point iterative schema. at the constitutive level, the gradient-based drucker-prager model for cohesive-frictional material by vrech and etse (2005) is considered, which was formulated in the framework of the thermodynamically consistent gradient plasticity theory by svedberg (1999). the robustness and efficiency of the proposed numerical tools are verified by means of computational analysis of inhomogeneous, uniaxial compression and tensile tests. these numerical results also demonstrate the capability of the gradient-dependent plasticity formulation to regularize the post peak response behavior regarding the mesh density as well as the influence of the internal length on the width of the plastic strains band.