Shear banding analysis of plastic models formulated for incompressible viscous flows

We investigate shear band orientations for a simple plastic formulation in the context of incompressible viscous flow. This type of material modelling has been introduced in literature to enable the numerical simulation of the deformation and failure of the lithosphere coupled with the mantle convection. In the present article, we develop a linear stability analysis to determine the admissible shear band orientations at the onset of bifurcation. We find that the so-called Roscoe angle and Coulomb angle are both admissible solutions. We present numerical simulations under plane strain conditions using the hybrid particle-in-cell finite element code Underworld. The results both in compressional and extensional stress conditions show that the variation of the numerical shear bands angle with respect to the internal friction angle follows closely the evolution of the Coulomb angle.