The ductile fracture behaviour of metallic materials is strongly dependent on the material's stress state and loading history. This paper presents a concept of damage initiation and failure indicators and corresponding evolution laws to enhance the modified Bai‐Wierzbicki model for predicting ductile damage under complex loading conditions. The proposed model considers the influence of stress triaxiality and the Lode angle parameter on both damage initiation and the subsequent damage propagation. The model parameters are calibrated for C45E + N steel using a series of mechanical tests and numerical simulations. The enhanced approach is applied to the modelling of various mechanical tests under proportional and non‐proportional loading conditions and successfully predicts the ductile damage behaviour in these tests.

Ductile failure of structural metals is relevant to a wide range of engineering scenarios. Computational methods are employed to anticipate the critical conditions of failure, yet they sometimes provide inaccurate and misleading predictions. Challenge scenarios, such as the one presented in the current work, provide an opportunity to assess the blind, quantitative predictive ability of simulation methods against a previously unseen failure problem. Rather than evaluate the predictions of a single simulation approach, the Sandia Fracture Challenge relies on numerous volunteer teams with expertise in computational mechanics to apply a broad range of computational methods, numerical algorithms, and constitutive models to the challenge. This exercise is intended to evaluate the state of health of technologies available for failure prediction. In the first Sandia Fracture Challenge, a wide range of issues were raised in ductile failure modeling, including a lack of consistency in failure models, the importance of shear calibration data, and difficulties in quantifying the uncertainty of prediction [see Boyce et al. (Int J Fract 186:5-68, 2014) for details of these observations]. This second Sandia Fracture Challenge investigated the ductile rupture of a Ti-6Al-4V sheet under both quasi-static and modest-rate dynamic loading (failure in ∼0.1 s). Like the previous challenge, the sheet had an unusual arrangement of notches and holes that added geometric complexity and fostered a competition between tensile-and shear-dominated failure modes. The teams were asked to predict the fracture path and quantitative far-field failure metrics such as the peak force and displacement to cause crack initiation. Fourteen teams contributed blind predictions, and the experimental outcomes were quantified in three independent test labs. Additional shortcomings were revealed in this second challenge such as inconsistency in the application of appropriate boundary conditions, need for a thermomechanical treatment of the heat generation in the dynamic loading condition, and further difficulties in model calibration based on limited realworld engineering data. As with the prior challenge, this work not only documents the 'state-of-the-art' in computational failure prediction of ductile tearing scenarios, but also provides a detailed dataset for non-blind assessment of alternative methods.

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