Keywords:review, the Portevin-Le Chatelier effect, serrated yielding, physical mechanisms, strain aging, negative strain-rate sensitivity, instability, experimental studies, phenomenological models.Jump-like deformations as a phenomenon of plastic deformation instability is found for a wide range of ductile materials within certain temperature and strain rate ranges. It is known that temperature and strain rate are the most important parameters of inelastic deformation. For most polycrystals, in the absence of phase transitions, the increase of temperature and decrease of deformation speed leads to a reduction of stresses of inelastic deformation resistance. At the same time there is an inverse dependence of the flow stress for a great number of alloys in some ranges of temperatures and strain rates. Many researchers think that the main reason of this anomalous behaviour is a diffusion process and interaction of dislocations with solute atoms. The Portevin-Le Chatelier effect is one of the best known manifestations of the influence of diffusion processes on the behaviour of deformable materials. At the moment it is an urgent problem to identify ranges of actions, within which serrated yielding is implemented in order to exclude them from manufacturing modes of metal processing.It is preferable to use methods and approaches based on mathematical modelling for the analysis of serrated yielding, determination of optimal processing modes and design of new materials, as experimental methods are very resource intensive and applicable only for existing materials. It is not possible to build mathematical models of the studied processes with a required degree of sufficiency without a thorough study of available empirical data and establishment of leading physical mechanisms.In the first part of the review we consider the works devoted to the description of physical mechanisms and experimental studies of serrated yielding. The main mechanism is considered to be dislocations pinning with solute atoms during delays of motion of dislocations with barriers of different nature. Three main types of the Portevin-Le Chatelier effects have been allocated based on the experimental data of uniaxial loading, in real experiments, different combinations of these three types can be found. Different approaches and models (macrophenomenological, structural mechanical, physical) are used for the theoretical description of serrated yielding; only phenomenological models are analyzed in the present review.
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