Globally stable quasistatic evolution in plasticity with softening

We study a relaxed formulation of the quasistatic evolution problem in the context of small strain associative elastoplasticity with softening. The relaxation takes place in spaces of generalized Young measures. The notion of solution is characterized by the following properties: global stability at each time and energy balance on each time interval. An example developed in detail compares the solutions obtained by this method with the ones provided by a vanishing viscosity approximation, and shows that only the latter captures a decreasing branch in the stress-strain response.