Stress gradient plasticity

 Liu, D., He, Y., Zhang, B., 2013. Towards a further understanding of dislocation pileups in the presence of stress gradients.  Doi: 10.1080/14786435.2013.774096

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14786435.2013.774096#preview

This study is an essential complement and extension to the stress-gradient concept recently proposed by Hirth. An analytic method is presented for studying the behaviour of double-ended dislocation pileup in the presence of various stress gradients by solving a singular integral equation based on the continuous approximation of dislocations. Four special cases of double-ended pileup in the presence of stress gradients are discussed in detail. The corresponding dislocation distribution, the length of pileup, the total number of dislocations within the pileup and the force on the leading dislocations at the pileup ends are derived, respectively. It is shown that both the number of dislocations and the force on the leading dislocation in a pileup are sensitive to the relative magnitude of stress near the dislocation source and both are less than that in constant stress case. Of particular importance, it is indicated that the small-scaled materials subjected to a stress involving a gradient would be stronger than that under a constant stress. Applied to wire torsion and foil bending, the stress gradient model predicts an increase in the initial yielding, which is in reasonable agreement with the recent experimental data. The proposed stress gradient concept may provide a new physical insight into the size-dependent plasticity phenomena at small length scale.