Search for: All records

Understanding stress distributions at grain boundaries in polycrystalline materials is crucial for predicting damaged nucleation sites. In high-purity materials, voids often nucleate at grain boundaries due to high stress from granular interactions and weakened atomic ordering. While traditional crystal plasticity models simulate grain-level mechanics, their high computational cost often prevents systematic identification of critical microstructural features and efficient forecast of extreme damage events. This paper addresses these challenges by developing a computationally efficient physics-assisted statistical modelling framework. The method starts by leveraging physical knowledge to hypothesize a broad set of microstructural factors influencing stress conditions. Causal inference is then applied to reveal the predominant features with physical explanations, leading to a parsimonious statistical model. A conditional Gaussian mixture model (CGMM) is employed when the identified relationship is utilized as a predictive model to quantify the uncertainty not readily explained by these features. Using body-centred cubic (BCC) tantalum as a representative material, a series of synthetic microstructures from single- to octu-crystal configurations are created. Results show that high-stress states strongly correlate with the elastic and plastic deformation capabilities and the directional misalignment of grain responses near boundaries. The statistical model achieves rapid and accurate forecasts, demonstrating its potential for analysing realistic polycrystalline materials. 

This research paper presents an experimental, theoretical, and numerical study of the thermomechanical behavior of single-crystal and polycrystal copper under uniaxial stress compression loading at varying rates of deformation. The thermomechanical theory is based on a thermodynamically consistent framework for single-crystal face-centered cubic metals, and assumes that all plastic power is partitioned between stored energy due to dislocation structure evolution (configurational) and thermal (kinetic vibrational) energy. An expression for the Taylor–Quinney factor is proposed, which is a simple function of effective temperature and is allowed by second-law restrictions. This single-crystal model is used for the study of single- and polycrystal copper. New polycrystal thermomechanical experimental results are presented at varying strain rates. The temperature evolution on the surface of the polycrystal samples is measured using mounted thermocouples. Thermomechanical numerical single- and polycrystal simulations were performed for all experimental conditions ranging between 10−3 and 5 × 103 s−1. A Taylor homogenization model is used to represent polycrystal behavior. The numerical simulations of all conditions compare reasonable well with experimental results for both stress and temperature evolution. Given our lack of understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the coupling of dislocation glide and atomic vibration, this implies that the proposed theory is a reasonably accurate approximation of the single-crystal thermomechanics.