Viscoplasticity with a saturation stress: distinguishing features of the model

Viscoplastic models including a saturation stress are considered. The existence of the saturation stress significantly changes the mathematical structure of solutions near maximum friction surfaces (surfaces where the friction stress is equal to the local shear yield stress). The main features of solutions based on such theories are: (a) sliding must occur at the maximum friction surfaces under certain conditions, (b) the velocity field may be singular in the vicinity of maximum friction surfaces. The objective of the present paper is to study these features of solutions. The mathematical structure obtained is considered to be advantageous for a class of materials and may lead to a convergence of viscoplastic solutions to the corresponding rigid perfectly plastic solutions. It seems that the latter is of importance for the construction of a unified theory that could describe the material behavior in the range from rate-independent plasticity to viscoplasticity. In the present paper, the study of the main features of the model is based on the exact closed-form solution to the problem of flow between two coaxial rotating cylinders. In the case of sliding, in addition to the aforementioned features, the asymptotic behavior of the velocity field in the vicinity of the maximum friction surface is found for a class of constitutive laws