A double incremental variational procedure for elastoplastic composites with combined isotropic and linear kinematic hardening

We investigate the nonlinear behavior of elasto-plastic composites with isotropic and linear kinematic hardening. We first rely on the incremental variational principles introduced by Lahellec and Suquet (2007a). We also take advantage of an alternative formulation, recently proposed by Agoras et al. (2016) for visco-plastic composites without hardening, which consists in a double application of the variational procedure of Ponte-Castañeda. We extend in this paper this approach to elasto-plastic composites with combined linear kinematic and isotropic work-hardening. The first application of the variational procedure linearizes the local behavior, including hardening, and leads to a thermo-elastic Linear Comparison Composite (LCC) with a heterogeneous polarization field inside the phases. The second one deals with the heterogeneity of the polarization and results in a new thermo-elastic LCC with a per-phase homogeneous polarization field, which effective behavior can then be estimated by classical linear homogenization schemes. We develop and implement this new incremental variational procedure for composites comprised of linear elastic spherical particles isotropically distributed in an elasto-plastic matrix. The predictions of the model are compared with results available in the literature for cyclic proportional and non-proportional loadings. New results for elasto-plastic composites with combined isotropic and kinematic hardening are also provided. They are in good agreement with the numerical computations we carried out, at both local and macroscopic scales.