Screw dislocation interacting with imperfect interface

The study of dislocations interacting with interfaces is of great interest to understand the strengthening and hardening mechanisms in materials. Most of the existing results in this field dealt with perfect interfaces where the displacements are continuous across interfaces. In reality, however, due to damage of interfaces or other reasons, the displacements across interfaces could have a jump. In the present study, a linear spring model is applied to study imperfect interfaces, and the interaction of a screw dislocation with an imperfect interface is formulated. The results show that the interacting force on a screw dislocation with an imperfect interface varies between that with a free surface and that with a perfect interface. It should be pointed out that the present study is the first step of the dislocation/ imperfect-interface research. The interaction between edge dislocations and imperfect interface is a more practically important and challenging problem. 2002 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.