Abstract:
Considering the potential applications of relatively new materials like toughened
structural polymers, metallic foams, plastics, transformation toughened ceramics,
vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (VACNTs) etc and their limited exploration till now,
it appears that there is a need to investigate more about the behavior of such materials
under a wide range of loadings. Even though the effect of plastic dilatancy is neglected in
classical plasticity theory, the above materials exhibit plastic volume changes and/or
pressure-sensitive flow strength. In a recent study, it has been observed that the
deformation of the entangled arrays of carbon nanotubes or VACNTs follow elasticviscoplastic
constitutive relation which incorporates plastic compressibility, plastic nonnormality
and a hardening-softening-hardening type hardness function.
