Unraveling the origin of extra strengthening in gradient nanotwinned metals

Materials containing heterogeneous nanostructures hold great promise for achieving superior mechanical properties. However, the strengthening effect due to plastically inhomogeneous deformation in heterogeneous nanostructures has not been clearly understood. Here, we investigate a prototypical heterogeneous nanostructured material of gradient nanotwinned (GNT) Cu to unravel the origin of its extra strength arising from gradient nanotwin structures relative to uniform nanotwin counterparts. We measure the back and effective stresses of GNT Cu with different nanotwin thickness gradients and compare them with those of homogeneous nanotwinned Cu with different uniform nanotwin thicknesses. We find that the extra strength of GNT Cu is caused predominantly by the extra back stress resulting from nanotwin thickness gradient, while the effective stress is almost independent of the gradient structures. The combined experiment and strain gradient plasticity modeling show that an increasing structural gradient in GNT Cu produces an increasing plastic strain gradient, thereby raising the extra back stress. The plastic strain gradient is accommodated by the accumulation of geometrically necessary dislocations inside an unusual type of heterogeneous dislocation structure in the form of bundles of concentrated dislocations. Such a heterogeneous dislocation structure produces microscale internal stresses leading to the extra back stress in GNT Cu. Altogether, this work establishes a fundamental connection between the gradient structure and extra strength in GNT Cu through the mechanistic linkages of plastic strain gradient, heterogeneous dislocation structure, microscale internal stress, and extra back stress. Broadly, this work exemplifies a general approach to unraveling the strengthening mechanisms in heterogeneous nanostructured materials.

The combined effect of size, inertia and porosity on the indentation response of ductile materials

Herein, we present a self-similar cavity expansion model that follows from the work of Cohen and Durban (2013b) to analyze the dynamic indentation response of elasto-plastic porous materials while accounting for the plastic strain gradient induced size effect. The incorporation of the plastic strain gradient induced size effect in the dynamic cavity expansion model for elasto-plastic porous materials is the key novelty of our model. The predictions of the cavity expansion model for the material hardness, for different indentation depths and speeds, are compared against the available experimental results for OFHC copper, for strain rates varying from 10−4 s−1 to 108 s−1. We note that despite several simplifying assumptions, the predictions of our cavity expansion model show a reasonable agreement with the experimentally measured material hardness over a wide range of indentation depths and speeds. In addition, we have also carried out parametric analyses to elucidate the specific roles of indentation speed, size effect and initial porosity, on the material hardness and cavitation fields that develop during the indentation process. In particular, our parametric analyses show that there exists a critical value of the indentation speed beyond which the contribution of inertial effect becomes extremely important and the material hardness increases rapidly. While the influence of the initial porosity on the material hardness is found to increase with increasing indentation speed and decrease with increasing size effect.

Equivalent plastic strain gradient enhancement of single crystal plasticity: theory and numerics

We propose a visco-plastic strain gradient plasticity theory for single crystals. The gradient enhancement is based on an equivalent plastic strain measure. Two physically equivalent variational settings for the problem are discussed: a direct formulation and an alternative version with an additional micromorphic-like field variable, which is coupled to the equivalent plastic strain by a Lagrange multiplier. The alternative formulation implies a significant reduction of nodal degrees of freedom. The local algorithm and element stiffness matrices of the finite-element discretization are discussed. Numerical examples illustrate the advantages of the alternative formulation in three-dimensional simulations of oligo-crystals. By means of the suggested formulation, complex boundary value problems of the proposed plastic strain gradient theory can be solved numerically very efficiently.

Material Intrinsic Length in Plastic Strain Gradient Theory and Microbending Process of Metal Foils

In microbending experiments of metal foils an increase of non-dimensional bending moment with decreasing foil thickness has been observed, which indicates the obvious presence of size effects. It is attributed to plastic strain gradient. So a constitutive model taking into account plastic strain gradient together with conventional plastic strain hardening is proposed to analyze the non-dimensional bending moment in microbending process. It is confirmed that the predictions by using the proposed hardening model agree well with the experimental data, while those determined by using conventional elastoplastic model cannot capture such size effects. A semi-empirical expression is reasonable to determine the material intrinsic length as a function of shear modulus, initial yield strength, length of Burger’s vector, grain size, and macro geometrical characteristic scale of the specimen.