Continuum modelling of stress diffusion interactions in an elastoplastic medium in the presence of geometric discontinuity

Abstract: Chemo-mechanical coupled systems have been a subject of interest for many decades now. Previous attempts to solve such models have mainly focused on elastic materials without taking into account the plastic deformation beyond yield, thus causing inaccuracies in failure calculations. This paper aims to study the effect of stress-diffusion interactions in an elastoplastic material using a coupled chemo-mechanical system. The induced stress is dependent on the local concentration in a one way coupled system, and vice versa in a two way coupled system. The time-dependent transient coupled system is solved using a finite element formulation in an open-source finite element solver FEniCS. This paper attempts to computationally study the interaction of deformation and diffusion and its effect on the localization of plastic strain. We investigate the role of geometric discontinuities in scenarios involving diffusing species, namely, a plate with a notch/hole/void and particle with a void/hole/core. We also study the effect of stress concentrations and plastic yielding on the diffusion-deformation. The developed code can be from https://github.com/mrupeshkumar/Elastoplastic-stress-diffusion-coupling