Effect of nanoscale amorphization on dislocation emission from a semi-elliptical surface crack tip in nanocrystalline materials

Abstract

An impact analysis model is built to describe the effect of nanoscale amorphization on dislocation emission from a surface semi-elliptical crack tip in nanocrystalline materials. The nanoscale amorphization is formed by the splitting transformation of grain boundary(GB)disclinations caused by the motion of GBs. The analytical solution of the model is obtained by using the complex method, and the influence of nanoscale amorphization, dislocation emission angle, crack length, and curvature radius of surface crack tip on the critical stress intensity factor (SIF) of the first dislocation emission is investigated through numerical analysis. The numerical analysis shows that the impact of nanoscale amorphization on the critical SIF corresponding to dislocation emission depends on the dislocation emission angle, the position and the size of the nanoscale amorphous, the curvature radius, and the length of surface crack. As the curvature radius of surface crack tip and the crack length increase, the normalized critical SIF increases. When the nanoscale amorphization size is small, it has a great impact on the critical SIF for dislocation, but when the size is relatively large, the effect becomes small. The effect of the increasing strength of the nanoscale amorphization on dislocation emission from the surface crack tip is related to the distance between the nanoscale amorphization and the crack tip, and there is a critical crack-junction for which the increase of dislocation strength has little effect on dislocation emission.