ABSTRACT
The simulation of industrial components with regard to their mechanical behaviour is basically achieved by means of the finite element method. Thus, for any particular material class a constitutive model is needed, that is able to predict the complete correlation between the given strain condition and the corresponding stress condition, while also considering the loading history. In general, this is equivalent to the input of six independent coefficients of the strain tensor to the user subroutine and the output of six stress values of the corresponding stress tensor. The development of such a three-dimensional constitutive model usually takes a lot of time but often leads to an intermediate stage, that at least enables the prediction of the material behaviour for uniaxial tension. In such a situation it would be a great advantage to find a sufficient approximation of the prospective general behaviour of a constitutive model by describing the uniaxial material behaviour only. This is the idea of the so-called concept of representative directions (Ihlemann 2007).
