Effect of residual stress on cavitation instabilities in constrained metal wires

Numerical calculations are carried out for a test specimen geometry used by Ashby et al. to study effects of ductile reinforcements in brittle materials. A lead wire well bonded to an outer glass cylinder was used to investigate crack bridging by ductile particles. The main focus here is on a single void growing very large in the metal wire, in the crack plane, perhaps involving a cavitation instability. Therefore, full finite strain elastic-plastic theory is used for the analyses, and remeshing procedures are applied to avoid unacceptable mesh distortion. Residual stresses induced by thermal contraction mismatch during cooling from the processing temperature can have a noticeable influence on the results, and this is quantified by the analyses.