摘要

Different mechanisms such as glide of lattice dislocation and grain boundary mediated processes may be active during the plastic deformation of polycrystals with small grain size. A continuum model for polycrystal plasticity has been developed to capture such a feature. Specifically, the strain gradient effect due to dislocation pile-up, dislocation emission/absorption at surface and grain boundary sliding have been taken into account from the perspective of energy storage. As an application of the model, a bicrystal under plane constrained shear has been considered. The dependence of yield strength on the thickness of the bicrystal has been investigated. It has been demonstrated the present model predicts the yield strength of the bicrystal first increases and then decrease with decrease in the thickness, which is similar to the inverse Hall-Petch behavior but with a different scaling. Such behavior is attributed to the transition in different dominant deformation mechanisms at different values of the thickness.

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