An adaptive mesh refinement technique for two-dimensional shear band problems

We have developed an adaptive mesh refinement technique that rezones the given domain for a fixed number of quadrilateral elements such that fine elements are generated within the severely deformed region and coarse elements elsewhere. Loosely speaking, the area of an element is inversely proportional to the value of the deformation measure at its centroid. Here we use the temperature rise at a material point to gauge its deformations which is reasonable for the shear band problem since the material within the shear band is deformed intensely and is heated up significantly. It is shown that the proposed mesh refinement technique is independent of the initial starting mesh, and that the use of an adaptively refined mesh gives thinner shear bands, and sharper temperature rise and the growth of the second invariant of the plastic strain-rate within the band as compared to that for a fixed mesh having the same number of nodes. The method works well even when the deformation localizes into more than one narrow region.