A numerical study of the constitutive characterization of thermoplastic materials submitted to finite strain

•Error using only force in the constitutive characterization of heterogeneous strain.•Use of heterogeneous deformation field for accurate constitutive characterization.•Use of the non-conflicting concept to assess the performance of constitutive models. The mechanical characterization of thermoplastics submitted to finite strain is a non-trivial procedure since they may present necking and cold-drawing. These phenomena are associated with heterogeneous strain fields that may mask the real stress–strain curve and lead to mistaken conclusions about the capability of constitutive models to represent the material mechanical response. Aiming to shed light on this issue, this paper presents a numerical study based on a Finite Element Method Updating (FEMU) technique to obtain the true stress–strain curve of a thermoplastic specimen. FEMU technique is employed to characterize three elastoplastic models with different mathematical frameworks. Inverse problems are constructed considering force response and displacement data of a heterogeneous strain field on the specimen due to the necking and neck propagation kinematics. Results shown that even a very simple multilinear elastoplastic model, available in commercial software, is capable of representing force response of a tensile test when only experimental force data is considered. However, when the necking kinematics is taken into account, the studied models present different results and poor mechanical behavior representation, indicating that only the force data obtained from a tensile test is not enough to establish conclusions about the performance of a constitutive model when heterogeneous strain field occurs. Since none of the models was capable of accurately reproduce the experimental force and kinematics data, to evaluate which model performs better, it is proposed a multi-objective analysis of Pareto front results.