Identification of strain-rate and thermal sensitive material model with an inverse method

This paper describes a numerical inverse method to extract material strength parameters from the experimental data obtained via mechanical tests at different strain-rates and temperatures. It will be shown that this procedure is particularly useful to analyse experimental results when the stress-strain fields in the specimen cannot be correctly described via analytical models. This commonly happens in specimens with no regular shape, in specimens with a regular shape when some instability phenomena occur (for example the necking phenomena in tensile tests that create a strongly heterogeneous stress-strain fields) or in dynamic tests (where the strain-rate field is not constant due to wave propagation phenomena). Furthermore the developed procedure is useful to take into account thermal phenomena generally affecting high strain-rate tests due to the adiabatic overheating related to the conversion of plastic work. The method presented requires strong effort both from experimental and numerical point of view, anyway it allows to precisely identify the parameters of different material models. This could provide great advantages when high reliability of the material behaviour is necessary. Applicability of this method is particularly indicated for special applications in the field of aerospace engineering, ballistic, crashworthiness studies or particle accelerator technologies, where materials could be submitted to strong plastic deformations at high-strain rate in a wide range of temperature. Thermal softening effect has been investigated in a temperature range between 20°C and 1000°C.