The effect of damage field on the transient creep in plate bending

The failure of many important structural elements as a final result of damage growth process involves a number of computational problems. Modeling of damage is one of the most important. It reflects in developing a new branch of mechanics named Continuum Damage Mechanics, reviewed (Lemaitre 1979, Krajcinovic 1983) and employed in numerous contributions to the SMIRT Conferences. For creep of metal components in elevated temperatures the nonlinearity of constitutive equations makes the analysis particulary complex. Finally, the stress redistribution which takes place beginning at initial elastic state through nonstationary and stationary states until terminal drop of stress at points of failure, poses additional computational problems. As result, the majority of solutions available is limited to stationary state of stress (Chrzanowski and Madej 1985), or to bi-axial state of stress (Hayhurst et al. 1984), or to axi-symetrical problems (Gadomski and Wojewodzki 1983), or to linear creep (Sawczuk and Sadowski 1983). In the present paper an attempt is made to incorporate all above phenomena with the aim of better approximation of real time to rupture evaluation for plate in bending. (orig.)