Unified crystal plasticity model for fcc metals: From quasistatic to shock loading

Mechanical response of metals is strongly dependent on the strain rate and exhibits drastic change as the strain rate varies across >10 orders of magnitude from quasistatic to shock loading. In this paper, we developed a unified crystal plasticity model for face-centered cubic (fcc) metals to describe the mechanical response in a wide range of strain rate from 10-5 to 107/s. The plasticity framework adopts the dislocation-based Orowan equation. Specifically, the mobility law for dislocation velocity incorporates both the thermal activation mech-anism dominating at low strain rates and drag mechanism dominating at high strain rates, through a repeating waiting-running model. The rate dependence of total dislocation density (rho t) evolution in the Orowan equation (implicitly) is captured by coupling the rate-dependent annihilation and the stress-dependent nucleation. More importantly, to capture the huge variation in mobile/total dislocation ratio (f = rho m/rho t) at different strain rates, we propose a physics-based law for mobile dislocation fraction f based on the exponential distribution of dislocation link lengths through a critical link length determined by the local stress. In addition, a thermohyperelastic model is supplemented to account for the nonlinear elastic behavior and thermoelastic coupling at shock loading. This unified model is validated against the mechanical response of single-crystal aluminum from quasistatic (10-5/s) to shock loading (107/s), where the features of thermal softening in static loading, thermal hardening in shock loading, and the strain-rate hardening in the medium strain-rate range are all quantitatively evaluated by a single set of parameters with a high average R2 value of 0.93.

Automated summary

The mechanical response of metals depends on the strain rate and shows significant changes across a wide range of strain rates. The authors developed a unified crystal plasticity model for face-centered cubic (fcc) metals to describe their mechanical response at different strain rates.