Discrete Dislocation Plasticity (original) (raw)

Plastic deformation of crystalline solids is of both scientific and technological interest. Over a wide temperature range, the principal mechanism of plastic deformation in crystalline solids involves the glide of large numbers of dislocations. As a consequence, since the 1930s, when dislocations were identified as carriers of plastic deformation in crystalline solids, there has been considerable interest in elucidating the physics of individual dislocations and of dislocation structures. Major effort has also been devoted to developing tools to solve boundary value problems based on phenomenological continuum descriptions in order to predict the plastic deformations that result in structures and components from some imposed loading. Since the 1980s these two approaches have grown toward each other, driven by, for instance, miniaturization and the need for more accurate models in engineering design. The approaches meet at a scale where the collective behavior of individual dislocations controls phenomena. This encounter, together with continuously increasing computing power, has fostered the development of an approach where boundary value problems are solved with plastic flow modeled in terms of the collective motion of discrete dislocations represented as line defects in a linear elastic continuum . This is the field of discrete dislocation plasticity.