Perfect plasticity with damage and healing at small strains, its modeling, analysis, and computer implementation (Q2790408)

The paper presents a perfect plasticity model that includes both damage and healing considering small strains. It is specifically directed toward modeling of thin shear plastic bands with wider damage zones and possible healing of damage. A fractional time step discretization with assured numerical stability and convergence is employed to establish the weak solutions of the system of variational inequalities encountered in the development of the model. An efficient numerical implementation of the model is presented and illustrated by applying it to computational problems from geophysics. The work is interesting and has useful applications in geophysical modeling of reoccurring rupture of lithospheric faults.