It is shown that the size effect recently observed by Espinosa et al., fJ. Mech. Phys. Solids 51, 47 s2003dg in pure tension tests on free thin metallic films can be explained by the existence of a boundary layer of fixed thickness, located at the surface of the film that was attached onto the substrate during deposition. The boundary layer is influenced by the epitaxial effects of crystal grow...

The mechanical properties and microstructural developments of 321 stainless steel during thermomechanical process were investigated. The repetitive cold rolling and subsequent annealing were conducted to achieve nanocrystalline structure in an AISI 321 stainless steel. Heavily cold rolling at −20°C was conducted to form martensite in metastable austenitic steel. The process was followed by anne...

Ultrafine-grained (UFG) metallic materials are at the cutting edge of modern materials science as they exhibit outstanding properties which make them very interesting for prospective structural or functional engineering applications. Due to the progress in severe plastic deformation techniques during the last decade, ultrafine-grained microstructures are no longer only restricted to easy to def...

We consider single-crystal plasticity in the limiting case of infinite latent hardening, which signifies that the crystal must deform in single slip at all material points. This requirement introduces a nonconvex constraint, and thereby induces the formation of fine-scale structures. We restrict attention throughout to linearized kinematics and deformation theory of plasticity, which is appropr...