The evaluation of the temperature produced during adiabatic dissipative processes
for a large class of engineering materials (metals and some polymers) remains a
major subject of interest, notably in the fields of high-speed machining and
impact dynamics. The hypothesis consisting in considering the proportion of
plastic work dissipated as heat (quantified by the inelastic heat fraction
)
as independent on the loading path is now recognized as highly simplistic.
Experimental investigations have shown indeed the dependence of the
inelastic heat fraction on strain, strain rate and the temperature itself.
The theoretical studies available nowadays are not entirely conclusive on
various features regarding the history dependence and the evolution of
. The
present work attempts to provide a systematic approach to the temperature
rise and the inelastic heat fraction evolution for a general loading within
the framework of thermoelastic/viscoplastic standard modelling including a
number of quantitative variants regarding strain hardening/thermal softening
and thermomechanical coupling description. The theoretical results thus
obtained are confronted with experimental data from the literature. An
analysis of the effects of various model simplifications on the evaluation of
temperature growth with regard to conditions for dynamic plastic localization
occurrence is also carried out. It is shown that the value of critical shear strain at
localization incipience is strongly dependent on the level of simplification
admitted.