Plasticity theory aims at describing the yield loci and work hardening of a material under general deformation states. Most of its complexity arises from the nontrivial dependence of the yield loci on the complete strain history of a material and its microstructure. This motivated 3 ingenious simplifications that underpinned a century of developments in this field: 1) yield criteria describing yield loci location; 2) associative or nonassociative flow rules defining the direction of plastic flow; and 3) effective stress-strain laws consistent with the plastic work equivalence principle. However, 2 key complications arise from these simplifications. First, finding equations that describe these 3 assumptions for materials with complex microstructures is not trivial. Second, yield surface evolution needs to be traced iteratively, i.e., through a return mapping algorithm. Here, we show that these assumptions are not needed in the context of sequence learning when using recurrent neural networks, diverting the above-mentioned complications. This work offers an alternative to currently established plasticity formulations by providing the foundations for finding history- and microstructure-dependent constitutive models through deep learning.

Carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRPs) are attracting growing attention in industry because of their enhanced properties. Preforming of thermoset carbon fiber prepregs is one of the most common production techniques of CFRPs. To simulate preforming, several computational methods have been developed. Most of these methods, however, obtain the material properties directly from experiments such as uniaxial tension and bias-extension where the coupling effect between tension and shear is not considered. Neglecting this coupling effect deteriorates the prediction accuracy of simulations. To address this issue, we develop a Bayesian model calibration and material characterization approach in a multiscale finite element preforming simulation framework that utilizes mesoscopic representative volume element (RVE) to account for the tension-shear coupling. A new geometric modeling technique is first proposed to generate the RVE corresponding to the close-packed uncured prepreg. This RVE model is then calibrated with a modular Bayesian approach to estimate the yarn properties, test its potential biases against the experiments, and fit a stress emulator. The predictive capability of this multiscale approach is further demonstrated by employing the stress emulator in the macroscale preforming simulation which shows that this approach can provide accurate predictions.