Power-law creep from discrete dislocation dynamics

Novel method and instrument for temperature-dependent tensile test of metallic materials without thermometers

A novel method for measuring temperature and conducting tensile tests of metallic wires at elevated temperatures is presented. Ohmic heating is used to elevate the sample temperature with a uniform distribution, which could vary from room temperature to its melting point. The temperatures of the wires in steady states are determined by using a heat transfer model without measuring directly by thermometers, which reduces the error introduced by contact temperature measurement or optical pyrometers. This technique for temperature measurement can be applied to measuring temperature-dependent electrical resistivity and conducting temperature-dependent tensile tests of metallic materials. A low-cost instrument was designed to conduct the tensile tests. In this work, temperature-dependent Young's modulus, tensile strength at break, and the steady-state creep rate of 99.994%-pure Pb wires were further determined as applications of the tensile tests. The results show that the proposed method is valid and very useful for conducting temperature-dependent tensile tests of metallic materials.

Role of Grain Boundaries under Long-Time Radiation

Materials containing a high proportion of grain boundaries offer significant potential for the development of radiation-resistant structural materials. However, a proper understanding of the connection between the radiation-induced microstructural behavior of a grain boundary and its impact at long natural time scales is still missing. In this Letter, point defect absorption at interfaces is summarized by a jump Robin-type condition at a coarse-grained level, wherein the role of interface microstructure is effectively taken into account. Then a concise formula linking the sink strength of a polycrystalline aggregate with its grain size is introduced and is well compared with experimental observation. Based on the derived model, a coarse-grained formulation incorporating the coupled evolution of grain boundaries and point defects is proposed, so as to underpin the study of long-time morphological evolution of grains induced by irradiation. Our simulation results suggest that the presence of point defect sources within a grain further accelerates its shrinking process, and radiation tends to trigger the extension of twin boundary sections.

Unsupervised Calculation of Free Energy Barriers in Large Crystalline Systems

The calculation of free energy differences for thermally activated mechanisms in the solid state are routinely hindered by the inability to define a set of collective variable functions that accurately describe the mechanism under study. Even when possible, the requirement of descriptors for each mechanism under study prevents implementation of free energy calculations in the growing range of automated material simulation schemes. We provide a solution, deriving a path-based, exact expression for free energy differences in the solid state which does not require a converged reaction pathway, collective variable functions, Gram matrix evaluations, or probability flux-based estimators. The generality and efficiency of our method is demonstrated on a complex transformation of C15 interstitial defects in iron and double kink nucleation on a screw dislocation in tungsten, the latter system consisting of more than 120 000 atoms. Both cases exhibit significant anharmonicity under experimentally relevant temperatures.

Pure climb creep mechanism drives flow in Earth's lower mantle

At high pressure prevailing in the lower mantle, lattice friction opposed to dislocation glide becomes very high, as reported in recent experimental and theoretical studies. We examine the consequences of this high resistance to plastic shear exhibited by ringwoodite and bridgmanite on creep mechanisms under mantle conditions. To evaluate the consequences of this effect, we model dislocation creep by dislocation dynamics. The calculation yields to an original dominant creep behavior for lower mantle silicates where strain is produced by dislocation climb, which is very different from what can be activated under high stresses under laboratory conditions. This mechanism, named pure climb creep, is grain-size-insensitive and produces no crystal preferred orientation. In comparison to the previous considered diffusion creep mechanism, it is also a more efficient strain-producing mechanism for grain sizes larger than ca. 0.1 mm. The specificities of pure climb creep well match the seismic anisotropy observed of Earth's lower mantle.

Fast, vacancy-free climb of prismatic dislocation loops in bcc metals

Vacancy-mediated climb models cannot account for the fast, direct coalescence of dislocation loops seen experimentally. An alternative mechanism, self climb, allows prismatic dislocation loops to move away from their glide surface via pipe diffusion around the loop perimeter, independent of any vacancy atmosphere. Despite the known importance of self climb, theoretical models require a typically unknown activation energy, hindering implementation in materials modeling. Here, extensive molecular statics calculations of pipe diffusion processes around irregular prismatic loops are used to map the energy landscape for self climb in iron and tungsten, finding a simple, material independent energy model after normalizing by the vacancy migration barrier. Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations yield a self climb activation energy of 2 (2.5) times the vacancy migration barrier for 1/2〈111〉 (〈100〉) dislocation loops. Dislocation dynamics simulations allowing self climb and glide show quantitative agreement with transmission electron microscopy observations of climbing prismatic loops in iron and tungsten, confirming that this novel form of vacancy-free climb is many orders of magnitude faster than what is predicted by traditional climb models. Self climb significantly influences the coarsening rate of defect networks, with important implications for post-irradiation annealing.

Multiscale Theory of Dislocation Climb

Dislocation climb is a ubiquitous mechanism playing a major role in the plastic deformation of crystals at high temperature. We propose a multiscale approach to model quantitatively this mechanism at mesoscopic length and time scales. First, we analyze climb at a nanoscopic scale and derive an analytical expression of the climb rate of a jogged dislocation. Next, we deduce from this expression the activation energy of the process, bringing valuable insights to experimental studies. Finally, we show how to rigorously upscale the climb rate to a mesoscopic phase-field model of dislocation climb. This upscaling procedure opens the way to large scale simulations where climb processes are quantitatively reproduced even though the mesoscopic length scale of the simulation is orders of magnitude larger than the atomic one.

Quenched pinning and collective dislocation dynamics

Several experiments show that crystalline solids deform in a bursty and intermittent fashion. Power-law distributed strain bursts in compression experiments of micron-sized samples, and acoustic emission energies from larger-scale specimens, are the key signatures of the underlying critical-like collective dislocation dynamics - a phenomenon that has also been seen in discrete dislocation dynamics (DDD) simulations. Here we show, by performing large-scale two-dimensional DDD simulations, that the character of the dislocation avalanche dynamics changes upon addition of sufficiently strong randomly distributed quenched pinning centres, present e.g. in many alloys as immobile solute atoms. For intermediate pinning strength, our results adhere to the scaling picture of depinning transitions, in contrast to pure systems where dislocation jamming dominates the avalanche dynamics. Still stronger disorder quenches the critical behaviour entirely.

Avalanches in 2D dislocation systems: plastic yielding is not depinning

We study the properties of strain bursts (dislocation avalanches) occurring in two-dimensional discrete dislocation dynamics models under quasistatic stress-controlled loading. Contrary to previous suggestions, the avalanche statistics differ fundamentally from predictions obtained for the depinning of elastic manifolds in quenched random media. Instead, we find an exponent τ=1 of the power-law distribution of slip or released energy, with a cutoff that increases exponentially with the applied stress and diverges with system size at all stresses. These observations demonstrate that the avalanche dynamics of 2D dislocation systems is scale-free at every applied stress and, therefore, cannot be envisaged in terms of critical behavior associated with a depinning transition.