The Abaqus nonlinear FEA software has been used since its early days for a wide variety of metal plasticity simulations.  Many college curricula include a course in metal plasticity, and there is an advanced class from SIMULIA titled  "Metal Inelasticity in Abaqus".   If you work with metal plasticity problems, you really should take this class.  We will not repeat that material here. 

This post is intended to touch on just a few issues that come up frequently, and touch on issues where we can share some tools for defining metal plasticity material models. 

Converting from Engineering stress/strain to True stress/strain   - This post uses a narrated video to discuss the conversion issue and then demonstrates an Abaqus/CAE plug-in available from our Knowledge Base.  The plug-in takes uniaxial test data and processes it into the elastic and plastic parts for a simple Mises isotropic Elastic-Plastic material model.

Power-Law Plasticity    - This post explains some background of power-law plasticity models and then gives an Abaqus/CAE plug-in that can be used to calculate the Johnson-Cook power-law parameters from standard handbook data for metals.

Back to: Material Modeling and Calibration - An Overview and Curriculum