Quantized plastic deformation

Author:

N. Perchikov, L. Truskinovsky

Keyword:

Nonlinear Sciences, Pattern Formation and Solitons, Pattern Formation and Solitons (nlin.PS), Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci), Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO), Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph)

journal:

date:

2024-01-16 00:00:00

Abstract

In engineering crystal plasticity inelastic mechanisms correspond to tensorial, zero-energy, valleys in the space of macroscopic strains. The flat nature of such valleys is in contradiction with the fact that plastic slips, mimicking lattice-invariant shears, are inherently discrete. A reconciliation has recently been achieved in the mesoscopic tensorial model (MTM) of crystal plasticity, which introduces periodically modulated energy valleys while also capturing in a geometrically exact way the crystallographically-specific aspects of plastic slips. In this paper, we extend the MTM framework, which in its original form had the appearance of a discretized nonlinear elasticity theory, by explicitly introducing the concept of plastic deformation. The ensuing model contains a novel matrix-valued spin variable, representing the quantized plastic distortion, whose rate-independent evolution can be described by a discrete (quasi-)automaton. The proposed reformulation of the MTM leads to a considerable computational speedup associated with the use of a robust and efficient hybrid Gauss-Newton$-$Cauchy energy minimization algorithm. To illustrate the effectiveness of the new approach, we present a detailed case-study focusing on the aspects of crystal plasticity that are beyond reach for the classical continuum theory. Thus, we provide compelling evidence that the re-formulated MTM is fully adequate to deal with the intermittency of plastic response under quasi-static loading. In particular, our numerical experiments show that the statistics of dislocational avalanches, associated with plastic yield in 2D square crystals, exhibits a power-law tail with a critical exponent matching the value predicted by general theoretical considerations and independently observed in discrete-dislocation-dynamics (DDD) simulations.

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