Otherwise speaking, \(g_{p}\) is the plastic degradation function. The plastic degradation function is resembling the elastic degradation function and provides a mechanism for driving crack growth by the development of plastic strains. As a result, the case with \(g_{p}\) = 1, there is no plastic softening.

5. Numerical examples

The performance of the applied model is tested with the aid of several examples of the potential to capture representative aspects of fracture processes in ductile materials inside the proposed method, starting with the simplest one-the homogeneous plate subjected to pure tensile loading.
Table . Material Properties