On the homogeneous nucleation and propagation of dislocations under shock compression

Abstract

The dynamic response of crystalline materials subjected to extreme shock compression is not well understood. The interaction between the propagating shock wave and the material’s defect occurs at the sub-nanosecond timescale which makes in situ experimental measurements very challenging. Therefore, computer simulation coupled with theoretical modelling and available experimental data is useful to determine the underlying physics behind shock-induced plasticity. In this work, multiscale dislocation dynamics plasticity (MDDP) calculations are carried out to simulate the mechanical response of copper reported at ultra-high strain rates shock loading. We compare the value of threshold stress for homogeneous nucleation obtained from elastodynamic solution and standard nucleation theory with MDDP predictions for copper single crystals oriented in the [0 0 1]. MDDP homogeneous nucleation simulations are then carried out to investigate several aspects of shock-induced deformation such as; stress profile characteristics, plastic relaxation, dislocation microstructure evolution and temperature rise behind the wave front. The computation results show that the stresses exhibit an elastic overshoot followed by rapid relaxation such that the 1D state of strain is transformed into a 3D state of strain due to plastic flow. We demonstrate that MDDP computations of the dislocation density, peak pressure, dynamics yielding and flow stress are in good agreement with recent experimental findings and compare well with the predictions of several dislocation-based continuum models. MDDP-based models for dislocation density evolution, saturation dislocation density, temperature rise due to plastic work and strain rate hardening are proposed. Additionally, we demonstrated using MDDP computations along with recent experimental reports the breakdown of the fourth power law of Swegle and Grady in the homogeneous nucleation regime.