A numerical study of strain localization in elasto-thermo-viscoplastic materials using radial basis function networks

This paper presents a numerical simulation of the formation and evolution of strain localization in elasto-thermo-viscoplastic materials (adiabatic shear band) by the indirect/integral radial basis function network (IRBFN) method. The effects of strain and strain rate hardening, plastic heating, and thermal softening are considered. The IRBFN method is enhanced by a new coordinate mapping which helps capture the stiff spatial structure of the resultant band. The discrete IRBFN system is integrated in time by the implicit fifth-order Runge-Kutta method. The obtained results are compared with those of the Modified Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (MSPH) method and Chebychev Pseudo-spectral (CPS) method