Polycrystal Modelling with Experimental Integration: A Symposium Honoring Carlos Tomé (San Diego, CA, USA, February 27–March 3 2011)

Abstract

This special issue contains selected contributions from invited speakers to the 'Polycrystal Modelling with Experimental Integration: A Symposium Honoring Carlos Tomé', held as part of the 2011 TMS Annual Meeting and Exhibition, that took place on February 27–March 3, 2011 in San Diego, CA, USA. This symposium honored the remarkable contributions of Dr Carlos N Tomé to the field of mechanical behavior of polycrystalline materials, on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Throughout his career, Dr Tomé has pioneered the theoretical and numerical development of models of polycrystal mechanical behavior, with emphasis on the role played by texture and microstructure on the anisotropic behavior of engineering materials. His many contributions have been critical in establishing a strong connection between models and experiments, and in bridging different scales in the pursuit of robust multiscale models with experimental integration. Among his achievements, the numerical codes that Dr Tomé and co-workers have developed are extensively used in the materials science and engineering community as predictive tools for parameter identification, interpretation of experiments, and multiscale calculations in academia, national laboratories and industry. The symposium brought together materials scientists and engineers to address current theoretical, computational and experimental issues related to microstructure–property relationships in polycrystalline materials deforming in different regimes, including the effects of single crystal anisotropy, texture and microstructure evolution. Synergetic studies, involving different crystal plasticity-based models, including multiscale implementations of the latter, and measurements of global and local textures, internal strains, dislocation structures, twinning, phase distribution, etc, were discussed in more than 90 presentations.The papers in this issue are representative of the different length-scales, materials, and experimental and modeling techniques addressed in the symposium. The special issue starts with two papers by Wang et al presenting molecular dynamics studies of the interaction of dislocations with grain and twin boundaries in hcp crystals. The papers by Vu et al and Mercier et al that follow present novel formulations based on non-linear homogenization for viscoelastic and elasto-viscoplastic polycrystals, respectively. Next, two papers by Merkel et al and Beaudoin et al report on synchrotron x-ray measurements of lattice strains in hcp-iron and Al–Li (fcc) polycrystals, respectively, interpreted by means of polycrystal plasticity models. The following two papers by Field et al and Lefebvre et al show how orientation images of polycrystalline cubic metals obtained by electron backscatter diffraction can be used as direct input of models for quantification of dislocation density fields and surface roughness, respectively. Finally, the papers by Jeong et al and Vanna Yang et al show applications of physically-based models of polycrystal plasticity to the analysis of the anisotropic plastic response of stainless steels, and the strain-hardening of Mg–Al alloys, respectively.