Modeling of Dislocation Structures in Materials

The notion of a congruence of effective dislocation lines endowed with the nonvanishing local Burgers vector is introduced. Particularly, the class of congruences of principal Volterra-type effective dislocation lines associated with the dislocation densities (tensorial as well as scalar) is distinguished in order to investigate the geometry of continuized defective crystals in terms of these densities. It is shown that effective dislocation lines can be endowed with the disl...

Plasticity is governed by the evolution of, in general anisotropic, systems of dislocations. We seek to faithfully represent this evolution in terms of density-like variables which average over the discrete dislocation microstructure. Starting from T. Hochrainer's continuum theory of dislocations (CDD), we introduce a methodology based on the 'Maximum Information Entropy Principle' (MIEP) for deriving closed-form evolution equations for dislocation density measures of differe...

A geometrically nonlinear theory for field dislocation thermomechanics based entirely on measurable state variables is proposed. Instead of starting from an ordering-dependent multiplicative decomposition of the total deformation gradient tensor, the additive decomposition of the velocity gradient into elastic, plastic and thermal distortion rates is obtained as a natural consequence of the conservation of the Burgers vector. Based on this equation, the theory consistently ca...

To develop a dislocation-based statistical continuum theory of crystal plasticity is a major challenge of materials science.During the last two decades such a theory has been developed for the time evolution of a system of parallel edge dislocations. The evolution equations were derived by a systematic coarse-graining of the equations of motion of the individual dislocations and later retrieved from a functional of the dislocation densities and the stress potential by applyin...

We develop an approximation scheme for three-dimensional dislocation dynamics in which the dislocation line density is concentrated at points, or monopoles. Every monopole carries a Burgers vector and an element of line. The monopoles move according to mobility kinetics driven by elastic and applied forces. The divergence constraint, expressing the requirement that the monopoles approximate a boundary, is enforced weakly. The fundamental difference with traditional approximat...

We propose a model for three-dimensional solids on a mesoscopic scale with a statistical mechanical description of dislocation lines in thermal equilibrium. The model has a linearized rotational symmetry, which is broken by boundary conditions. We show that this symmetry is spontaneously broken in the thermodynamic limit at small positive temperatures.

A part of the theory of dislocations in crystals is revised with the aim to fit it into the framework of the nonlinear theory of plasticity initially designed for amorphous glassy materials.

A variational approach is presented to calculate the stress field generated by a system of dislocations. It is shown that in the simplest case, when the material containing the dislocations obeys Hooke's law the variational framework gives the same field equations as Kr\"oner's theory. However, the variational method proposed allows to study many other problems like dislocation core regularisation, role of elastic anharmonicity and dislocation--solute atom interaction. The ai...

Dislocation based modeling of plasticity is one of the central challenges at the crossover of materials science and continuum mechanics. Developing a continuum theory of dislocations requires the solution of two long standing problems: (i) to represent dislocation kinematics in terms of a reasonable number of variables and (ii) to derive averaged descriptions of the dislocation dynamics (i.e. material laws) in terms of these variables. The kinematic problem (i) was recently s...

In this paper we derive a line tension model for dislocations in 3d starting from a geometrically nonlinear elastic energy with quadratic growth. In the asymptotic analysis, as the amplitude of the Burgers vectors (proportional to the lattice spacing) tends to zero, we show that the elastic energy linearises and the line tension energy density, up to an overall constant rotation, is identified by the linearised cell problem formula given in [17].