2015/04/27 by Paolo Biscari, Biscari, Paolo, Marco Urbano +5
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #74C15 #74E15 #74N30 #Adhesion, Friction, and Surface Interactions #FOS: Physical sciences #Force Microscopy Techniques and Applications #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Microstructure and mechanical properties
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1504.06955
openalex publication_date 2015/04/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We develop a nonlinear, three-dimensional phase field model for crystal plasticity which accounts for the infinite and discrete symmetry group G of the underlying periodic lattice. This generates a complex energy landscape with countably-many G-related wells in strain space, whereon the material evolves by energy minimization under the loading through spontaneous slip processes inducing the creation and motion of dislocations without the need of auxiliary hypotheses. Multiple slips may be activated simultaneously, in domains separated by a priori unknown free boundaries. The wells visited by the strain at each position and time, are tracked by the evolution of a G-valued discrete plastic map, whose non-compatible discontinuities identify lattice dislocations. The main effects in the plasticity of crystalline materials at microscopic scales emerge in this framework, including the long-range elastic fields of possibly interacting dislocations, lattice friction, hardening, band-like vs. complex spatial distributions of dislocations. The main results concern the scale-free intermittency of the flow, with power-law exponents for the slip avalanche statistics which are significantly affected by the symmetry and the compatibility properties of the activated fundamental shears.