Hi, 

First of all, let me know if I published my question in the wrong place. For a project, I am trying to replicate the hysteretic behavior of a roller bearing in an assembly, using a Cartesian Cardan connector, in Abaqus CAE 2017.To do so, I created an elastoplastic behavior. In the plastic tab, I chose the isotropic hardening, using test data to model the curve. It works really well in the loading phase but relaxation resulted being purely elastic, which does not match the real behavior of the bearing. I then tried to add kinematic hardening in order to model the non-linear relaxation curve. The model runs with the two options ticked but kinematic hardening has no effect on the unloading. I read the documentation several times but I have to admit I do not have a full mechanical engineering training and am quite new to Abaqus… The kinematic hardening uses the same plastic motion points as the isotropic hardening, and the curve is a portion of the other (typically 0.2 times the tabular force data implemented in the isotropic hardening tab).

Do you have any idea how to proceed? Thank you in advance.