Computational Crystal Plasticity Homogenization using Empirically Corrected Cluster Cubature (E3C) Hyper-Reduction

Abstract: The computational homogenization of elastoplastic polycrystals is a challenging task due to the huge number of grains required, their complicated interactions and due to the complexity of crystal plasticity models per se. Despite a few successes of reduced order models, mean field and simplified homogenization approaches often remain the preferred choice. In this work, a recently proposed hyper-reduction method (called E3C) for projection-based Reduced Order Models (pROMs) is applied to the problem of computational homogenization of geometrically linearly deforming elastoplastic polycrystals. The main novelty lies in the identification of reduced modes (the 'E3C-modes'), which replace the strain modes of the reduced-order model, leading to a significantly smaller number of integration points. The peculiarity, which distinguishes the method from more conventional hyper-reduction techniques, is that the E3C integration points are not taken from the set of FE integration points. Instead, they can be interpreted as generalized integration points in strain space which are trained such as to satisfy an orthogonality condition, which ensures that the hyper-reduced model matches the equilibrium states and macroscopic stresses of full-field model data as accurately as possible. In addition, the number of grains is reduced, preserving the main features of the original texture of the finite element model. Two macroscopic engineering parts (untextured and textured) are simulated, illustrating the performance of the method in three-dimensional two-scale applications involving hundreds of thousands macroscopic degrees of freedom and millions of grains with computing times in the order of hours (cumulated online and offline effort) on standard laptop hardware.