Distortional plasticity framework with application to advanced high strength steel

•A modified version of the homogeneous anisotropic hardening (HAH) model is proposed.•The yield condition and state variable evolution equations are improved.•The influence of the hydrostatic stress is incorporated in the formulation.•The model is applied to the hardening description of a dual-phase DP780 steel sheet.•The model results successfully capture the physical experiments. An improved distortional plasticity framework that describes the anisotropic hardening occurring during strain path changes, such as the Bauschinger and cross-loading effects, is developed. This approach is a modified version of the homogeneous anisotropic hardening (HAH) framework proposed almost a decade ago. In the present formulation, the yield condition includes an alternative description of the distortion suggested by crystal plasticity simulation results. In addition, it incorporates the influence of the hydrostatic pressure, which manifests itself by a higher flow stress in uniaxial compression than in tension. The state variable evolutions are modified compared with the previous HAH version to improve the material response when the strain path changes occur near a pure cross-loading condition. The model is calibrated on a DP780 dual-phase steel sheet sample using the data of a tension-compression test with three full cycles, as well as a sequence of two uniaxial tension segments in different directions. After calibration, predicted and experimental stress-strain curves obtained for independent loading sequences are compared and shown to be good agreement. Finally, theoretical predictions of two-step tension tests using the constitutive coefficients of DP780 are discussed to highlight the improvement offered by this enhanced framework.