Tag Archives: polar decomposition

Illustration of polar decomposition

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This posting explains the meaning of a polar decomposition, and it gives two numerical methods for computing it.

Below is shown simple shear of a unit square.  The inscribed circle and the lines from corner to corner should be regarded as painted on the material, so they flow with deformation.  The green and red dashed lines show the principal directions of stretch, which are aligned with the major axes of the deformed ellipse and hence move relative to the material as the deformation proceeds.  In the deformed state (far right), the red and green dashed lines are defined to be aligned with the major axes of the deformed ellipse (far right). The red and green dashed lines in the other states show the material points covered by those green and red lines in the deformed state.

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Publication: Decomposition and Visualization of Fourth-Order Elastic-Plastic Tensors

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A.G. Neeman; R.M. Brannon; B. Jeremic; A. Van Gelderand;  A. Pang

Top view (Z from above) of eigentensors for Drucker-Prager material, time step 124, colored by minimum stretch eigenvalue.

Visualization of fourth-order tensors from solid mechanics has not been explored in depth previously. Challenges include the large number of components (3x3x3x3 for 3D), loss of major symmetry and loss of positive definiteness(with possibly zero or negative eigenvalues). This paper presents a decomposition of fourth-order tensors that facilitates their visualization and understanding. Fourth-order tensors are used to represent a solid’s stiffness.The stiffness tensor represents the relationship between increments of stress and increments of strain. Visualizing stiffness is important to understand the changing state of solids during plastification and failure. In this work,we present a method to reduce the number of stiffness components to second-order 3×3 tensors for visualization.The reduction is based on polar decomposition, followed by eigen-decomposition on the polar “stretch”. If any resulting eigenvalue is significantly lower than the others, the material has softened in that eigen-direction. The associated second-order eigentensor represents the mode of stress (such as compression, tension, shear, or some combination of these) to which the material becomes vulnerable. Thus we can visualize the physical meaning of plastification with techniques for visualizing second-order symmetric tensors.

Available Online:

Publication: http://www.mech.utah.edu/~brannon/pubs/7-2008NeemanBrannonJeremicVanGelderPang.pdf

Poster: http://www.mech.utah.edu/~brannon/pubs/7-09NeemanBrannonEtAlNEESposter.pdf

Powder metal jet penetration into stressed rock

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The Uintah computational framework (UCF) has been adopted for simulation of shaped charge jet penetration and subsequent damage to geological formations.  The Kayenta geomechanics model, as well as a simplified model for shakedown simulations has been  incorporated within the UCF and is undergoing extensive development to enhance it to account for fluid in pore space.

A generic penetration simulation using Uintah

The host code (Uintah) itself has been enhanced to accommodate  material variability and scale effects. Simulations have been performed that import flash X-ray data for the velocity and geometry of a particulated metallic jet so that uncertainty about the jet can be reduced to develop predictive models for target response.  Uintah’s analytical polar decomposition has been replaced with an iterative algorithm to dramatically improve accuracy under large deformations. Continue reading →

Tutorial: Mohr's Circle

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A self-study refresher with interesting tidbits such as Pole Point and how to do Mohr’s circle for nonsymmetric matrices — very useful for quickly doing a polar decomposition! (Last posted 2003, but considerable work has been performed recently to incorporate Mohr’s circle as part of the opensource VTK for visualization in finite element simulations).

You may download the rest of the document here.

Tutorial: Functional and Structured Tensor Analysis for Engineers

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A step-by-step introduction to tensor analysis that assumes you know nothing but basic calculus. Considerable emphasis is placed on a notation style that works well for applications in materials modeling, but other notation styles are also reviewed to help you better decipher the literature. Topics include: matrix and vector analysis, properties of tensors (such as “orthogonal”, “diagonalizable”, etc.), dyads and outer products, axial vectors, axial tensors, scalar invariants and spectral analysis (eigenvalues/eigenvectors), geometry (e.g., the equations for planes, ellipsoids, etc.), material symmetry such as transverse isotropy, polar decomposition, and vector/tensor calculus theorems such as the divergence theorem and Stokes theorem. (A draft of this document was last released publically on Aug. 3, 2003. The non-public version is significantly expanded in anticipation of formal publication.)

You may download the rest of the document here.