A New Class of Distributed-Element Models for Cyclic Plasticity - Part 2: On Important Properties of Material Behavior

A general theory is developed to elucidate important properties of inelastic material behavior under cyclic multi-axial loading conditions based on the behavior of the new Distributed-Element Models proposed in Part I. By establishing some important theorems on the behavior of the DEMs, the property of erasure-of-memory exhibited by real materials is shown to be closely related to the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium states, which is in turn a consequence of the property that the admissible stress region bounded by the limit surface associated with a Distributed-Element Model is bounded and strictly convex.