Effective yield surface of porous media with random overlapping identical spherical voids

The present paper concerns a computational study of a three-dimensional (3D) unit cells with identical spherical voids in a von Mises matrix. The objective is to estimate the effective plastic flow surface of 3D microstructures. The work originality is to deal with identical spherical overlapping voids, covering a wide range of stress triaxiality ratios. The effective plastic flow surface is computed for nine distinct loadings on four distinct microstructures. The result indicates that the classical Gurson–Tvergaard–Needleman (GTN) model obtained using the Fritzen et al. [40] parameters, matches with our numerical simulations. Keywords: Porous media, Random overlapping spherical voids, Computational homogenization, Macroscopic yield surface, Representativeness