Abstract In this study, a new micromechanically-motivated phenomenological uncoupled fracture model is proposed for predicting the ductile fracture of structural metals considering the combinative effects of stress state, strain hardening and micro-void shape. The Lee–Mearvoid growth theory, which is used for characterizing the growth of ellipsoidal voids in a hardening matrix, is modified to derive the influence function of stress triaxiality, void shape and strain hardening on material’s ductility. Meanwhile, a J2-J3 based Bai–Wierzbicki’s yield function is used as a failure criterion and incorporated into the power-law hardening function to derive the Lode dependence of fracture strain. Further, a detailed parametric study is performed to demonstrate the influence of the material parameters on the 3D fracture envelope and 2D fracture locus of the new model. It is shown that the unique feature of the new fracture model is that it constructs an explicit and quantitative relationship between the ductility, strength and microstructure of metals. All parameters in the new model have intuitive physical meanings which correspond to specific material property indies controlling the material strength and evolution of micro-void defects. In the meantime, these model parameters can be easily calibrated via conventional tests, which greatly reduces the difficulty of the calibration work and makes the model being more friendly for engineering applications. Finally, test data of three structural metals, i.e. 2024-T351, 6061-T6 aluminum alloys and Q460 high strength structural steel, obtained under two loading conditions, i.e. proportional and non-proportional loading conditions, are used to calibrate and validate the proposed model. The accuracy of the new fracture model is then investigated by comparing its prediction result with that obtained from the modified Mohr–Coulomb and Hosford–Coulomb model. It is shown that the proposed new fracture model can predict the ductility limit of the investigated structural metals accurately under a wide range of stress states and provides the same good prediction accuracy as the other two typical models, which confirms the promising prospect of the new model in practical applications.

Highlights • A ductile fracture model is developed considering effects of stress state, strain hardening and void shape. • A quantitative relationship between material’s ductility, strength and microstructure is constructed. • A parametric study shows how the fracture envelope evolve with the parameters. • The proposed fracture model is verified by test results of structural metals. • The new fracture model has the same good accuracy as other typical uncoupled models.