Crystal Plasticity Modeling of Microstructure Evolution and Mechanical Fields During Processing of Metals Using Spectral Databases

This article reviews the advances made in the development and implementation of a novel approach to speeding up crystal plasticity simulations of metal processing by one to three orders of magnitude when compared with the conventional approaches, depending on the specific details of implementation. This is mainly accomplished through the use of spectral crystal plasticity (SCP) databases grounded in the compact representation of the functions central to crystal plasticity computations. A key benefit of the databases is that they allow for a noniterative retrieval of constitutive solutions for any arbitrary plastic stretching tensor (i.e., deformation mode) imposed on a crystal of arbitrary orientation. The article emphasizes the latest developments in terms of embedding SCP databases within implicit finite elements. To illustrate the potential of these novel implementations, the results from several process modeling applications including equichannel angular extrusion and rolling are presented and compared with experimental measurements and predictions from other models.