Consideration of a core and mantle configuration for individual grains is a prominent method to capture the grain size-dependence in the constitutive models for polycrystal material. The mantle represents a region of the grain volume near the grain boundary where mechanical deformation is influenced by the grain boundaries, while the core represents the inner region of the grain volume. The grain size-dependence is then realized by assigning a set of values for the mechanical properties in the mantle that are different from those of the core region. However, these values for the mechanical properties of the mantle region are typically chosen arbitrarily, guided solely by the quality of the agreement between a model's predicted stress-strain behavior with that obtained experimentally. In the present study, a physics-based method to develop the grain size-dependent crystal plasticity constitutive model on the core and mantle configuration for polycrystal materials is presented. The method is based on the assumption that any resistance to dislocation nucleation and motion in a material manifests as an increase in yield strength and a decrease in strainhardening modulus, and the mutual relationship between yield strength and strain-hardening is an inherent material property that determines the plasticity of that specific material. Accordingly, the same single crystal plasticity constitutive model that describes the behavior of the material under loading can be used to capture the increased resistance to dislocation nucleation and motion in the grain boundary influence region. The physics-based modeling is facilitated by introducing a shear flow strain distribution in the phenomenological formulation and a pile-up of dislocation density distribution in the dislocation based formulation, such that, the resulting variations in the yield strength and the strain-hardening modulus are identical to that produced by the increased resistance in the grain boundary influence region. Thus, the increase in strength and the decrease in the strain-hardening modulus, determined as spatially varying local material properties in the mantle, are mutually related through the grain size-independent inherent plastic properties specific to the material. A simplified model that considers the grain boundary effect averaged over the grain volume is also developed under this general framework. Implementation of this simplified model is demonstrated by considering the case of a power law flow rule and a hyperbolic-secant hardening rule for the phenomenological formulation, and Taylor strength relation for the dislocation based formulation. Finally, the grain size-dependent constitutive model is validated by *
A multiscale computational model is developed for determining the elasto-plastic behavior of polycrystal metals by employing a single crystal plasticity constitutive model that can capture the microstructural scale stress field on a finite element analysis (FEA) framework. The generalized method of cells (GMC) micromechanics model is used for homogenizing the local field quantities. At first, the stand-alone GMC is applied for studying simple material microstructures such as a repeating unit cell (RUC) containing single grain or two grains under uniaxial loading conditions. For verification, the results obtained by the stand-alone GMC are compared to those from an analogous FEA model incorporating the same single crystal plasticity constitutive model. This verification is then extended to samples containing tens to hundreds of grains. The results demonstrate that the GMC homogenization combined with the crystal plasticity constitutive framework is a promising approach for failure analysis of structures as it allows for properly predicting the von Mises stress in the entire RUC, in an average sense, as well as in the local microstructural level, i.e., each individual grain. Two–three orders of saving in computational cost, at the expense of some accuracy in prediction, especially in the prediction of the components of local tensor field quantities and the quantities near the grain boundaries, was obtained with GMC. Finally, the capability of the developed multiscale model linking FEA and GMC to solve real-life-sized structures is demonstrated by successfully analyzing an engine disc component and determining the microstructural scale details of the field quantities.
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