I have a material that is brittle. When it reaches a yield stress of let's 10GPa, the material fractures and the plastic strain is at 0. However, my understanding is that this can cause convergence issues, since Abaqus suddenly sees no stiffness. When I tested this, my simulation failed because the plasticity material property cause the model to fail to converge at certain points. Instead of failure, I added another row of yield stress and plastic strain at 5% of failure yield stress and strain. Would what I am doing appropriate to help with convergence? Or should I actually add an negligible increase in yield stiffness over a very large plastic strain?

Abaqus ​​​​​​​