Abstract
Precipitates, present in most commercial alloys, can have a strong influence on strength and hardening behavior of a single crystal. The effect of thin precipitates on the anisotropy of initial slip resistance and hardening behavior of crystals is modeled in this article. For the convenience of the computational derivation and implementation, the material formulation is given in the unrelated intermediate configuration mapped by the plastic part of the deformation gradient. Material descriptions for the considered two phased aggregates consisting in lattice hardening as well as isotropic hardening and kinematic hardening are suggested. Numerical simulations of various loading cases are presented to discuss and assess the performance of the suggested model. From the results of the numerical simulation, it is found that the suggested model represents the initial plastic anisotropy at least qualitatively well and that it has an improved representation of various characteristic hardening behaviors in comparison with conventional hardening descriptions where the precipitate structure is not reflected.