Numerical assessment of the role of anisotropy on strain localization in uniaxial tension

Abstract. Despite the experimental evidence of the effect of loading direction on the inclination of necking bands in uniaxial tension, theoretical and numerical studies are mainly devoted to isotropic materials. Recently, theoretical, numerical, and experimental works have put into evidence the key role of the material anisotropy on the formation of localized necking bands. In particular, Cazacu and Rodriguez (2019) [1] provided analytical expressions for the orientations of the necking bands that develop under uniaxial tension in flat specimens . It was shown that there is a switch in the orientation of main necking band from acute to obtuse, which is correlated with the anisotropy in yield stresses. In this paper, we conduct a FE study on virtual materials with the same anisotropy in Lankford coefficients but different anisotropy in yield stresses. We show that, although both materials have a very slight anisotropy in yield stresses, it strongly affects the localization behavior.