Nucleation and growth of kink bands

Abstract

Abstract The geometric and strain properties of an ideal kink band in a perfectly plastic material with one slip surface are determined and two plausible modes by which a kink band can grow while maintaining these properties are presented. The first mode involves change in the orientation of the boundary surface of the kink band as it broadens. In the second mode the initial orientation of this boundary surface is maintained during broadening. A theoretical model is proposed for kink band formation in three stages: first, in an elastically strained material with a suitably oriented planar anisotropy; a small nucleus is either present or develops, and grows in thickness by one or the other or by both of the growth modes; second, as some critical thickness is reached, this nucleus propagates longitudinally until the excessive elastic distortion surrounding its ends is sufficiently relieved, or until the boundary of the body is reached; and third, the band widens by lateral migration of its boundaries, most probably by mode 2 growth. It is proposed that the direction of longitudinal propagation—and hence the orientation of the kink band with respect to principal normal stress—is decided by the value of a, the kink angle, in the nucleus at the time the critical thickness for propagation is reached. A further proposal is that this value of a is in turn decided by a principle of maximum plastic work: the instantaneous increment in strain or in volume within a nucleus is always the one for which the instantaneous increment in plastic work is a maximum at constant deviatoric stress. Calculations based on this theory for the two growth modes working either separately or together as competing processes yield three models of kink band nucleation in reasonable agreement with published experimental data. The most appealing of these models physically is one in which early mode 1 growth is replaced by mode 2 growth as the increments in mechanical work for the two modes become equal.