Quasistatic evolution for Cam-Clay plasticity: The spatially homogeneous case

We study the spatially uniform case of the problem of quasistatic evolution in small strain nonassociative elastoplasticity (Cam-Clay model). Through the introdution of a viscous approximation, the problem reduces to determine the limit behavior of the solutions of a singularly perturbed system of ODE’s in a finite dimensional Banach space. Depending on the sign of two explicit scalar indicators, we see that the limit dynamics presents, under quite generic assumptions, the alternation of three possible regimes: the elastic regime, when the limit equation is just the equation of linearized elasticity, the slow dynamics, when the strain evolves smoothly on the yield surface and plastic flow is produced, and the fast dynamics, which may happen only in the softening regime, where viscous solutions exhibit a jump across a heteroclinic orbit of an auxiliary system.