A computational damage model, which is driven by material, mechanical behavior, and nondestructive evaluation (NDE) data, is presented in this study. To collect material and mechanical behavior damage data, an aerospace grade precipitate-hardened aluminum alloy was mechanically loaded under monotonic conditions inside a scanning electron microscope, while acoustic and optical methods were used to track the damage accumulation process. In addition, to obtain experimental information about damage accumulation at the laboratory scale, a set of cyclic loading experiments was completed using three-point bending specimens made out of the same aluminum alloy and by employing the same nondestructive methods. The ensemble of recorded data for both cases was then used in a postprocessing scheme based on outlier analysis to form damage progression curves, which were subsequently used as custom damage laws in finite element (FE) simulations. Specifically, a plasticity model coupled with stiffness degradation triggered by the experimentally defined damage curves was used in custom subroutines. The results highlight the effect of the data-driven damage model on the simulated mechanical response of the geometries considered and provide an information workflow that is capable of coupling experiments with simulations that can be used for remaining useful life (RUL) estimations.

Advances in sensing and nondestructive evaluation methods have increased the interest in developing data-driven modeling and associated computational workflows for model-updating, in relation also to a variety of emerging digital twin applications. In this context, of particular interest in this investigation are transient effects that lead to or are caused by deformation instabilities, typically found in the cases of complex material behavior or in interactions between material and geometry. In both cases, deformation localizations are observed which are typically also related to damage effects. This manuscript describes a novel framework to incorporate deformation data into a finite element model (FEM) that has been formulated using non-local mechanics and is capable of receiving such data and using it to describe the development of localizations. Specifically, experimentally measured full field displacement data is used as an input in FEM as an ad-hoc boundary condition at any or every node in the body. To achieve this goal, a plasticity model which includes a spatially averaged non-local hardening parameter in the yield criterion is used to account for associated numerical instabilities and mesh dependence. Furthermore, the introduction of a length scale parameter into the constitutive law allows the connection between material behavior, geometry and localizations. Additional steps remove the experimental data and evolve the computational predictions forward in time. Both one and three-dimensional boundary value problems are used to present results obtained by the proposed framework, while comments are made in terms of its potential uses.