Non-local Continuum Thermodynamic Extensions of Crystal Plasticity to Include the Effects of Geometrically-necessary Dislocations on the Material Behaviour

The purpose of this work is the formulation of constitutive models for the inelastic material behaviour of single crystals and polycrystals in which geometrically-necessary dislocations (GNDs) may develop and influence this behaviour. To this end, we focus on the dependence of the development of such dislocations on the inhomogeneity of the inelastic deformation in the material. More precisely, in the crystal plasticity context, this is a relation between the density of GNDs and the inhomogeneity of inelastic deformation in glide systems. In this work, two models for GND density and its evolution, i.e., a glide-system-based model, and a continuum model, are formulated and investigated. As it turns out, the former of these is consistent with the original two-dimensional GND model of Ashby (1970), and the latter with the more recent model of Dai and Parks (1997). Since both models involve a dependence of the inelastic state of a material point on the (history of the) inhomogeneity of the glide-system inelastic deformation, their incorporation into crystal plasticity modeling necessarily implies a corresponding non-local generalization of this modeling. As it turns out, a natural quantity on which to base such a non-local continuum thermodynamic generalization, i.e., in the context of crystal plasticity, is the glide-system (scalar) slip deformation. In particular, this is accomplished here by treating each such slip deformation as either (1), a generalized “gradient” internal variable, or (2), as a scalar internal degree-of-freedom. Both of these approaches yield a corresponding generalized Ginzburg-Landauor Cahn-Allen-type field relation for this scalar deformation determined in part by the dependence of the free energy on the dislocation state in the material. In the last part of the work, attention is focused on specific models for the free energy and its dependence on this state. After summarising and briefly discussing the initial-boundary-value problem resulting from the current approach as well as its algorithmic form suitable for numerical implementation, the work ends with a discussion of additional aspects of the formulation, and in particular the connection of the approach to GND modeling taken here with other approaches. I thank Paolo Cermelli for helpful discussions and for drawing my attention to his work and that of Morton Gurtin on gradient plasticity and GNDs.