Mobility laws in dislocation dynamics simulations

Prediction of the plastic deformation behavior of single crystals based on the collective dynamics of dislocations has been a challenge for computational materials science for a number of years. The difficulty lies in the inability of existing dislocation dynamics (DD) codes to handle a sufficiently large number of dislocation lines, to establish a statistically representative model of crystal plasticity. A new massively parallel DID code is developed that is capable of modeling million-dislocation systems by employing thousands of processors. We discuss an important ingredient of this code - the mobility laws dictating the behavior of individual dislocations. They are materials input for DD simulations and are constructed based on the understanding of dislocation motion at the atomistic level. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.