Modelling Polycrystalline Materials: An Overview of Three-Dimensional Grain-Scale Mechanical Models

Abstract

A survey of recent contributions on three-dimensional grain-scale mechanical modelling of polycrystalline materials is given in this work. The analysis of material microstructures requires the generation of reliable micro-morphologies and affordable computational meshes as well as the description of the mechanical behavior of the elementary constituents and their interactions. The polycrystalline microstructure is characterized by the topology, morphology and crystallographic orientations of the individual grains and by the grain interfaces and microstructural defects, within the bulk grains and at the inter-granular interfaces. Their analysis has been until recently restricted to twodimensional cases, due to high computational requirements. In the last decade, however, the wider affordability of increased computational capability has promoted the development of fully three-dimensional models. In this work, different aspects involved in the grain-scale analysis of polycrystalline materials are considered. Different techniques for generating artificial micro-structures, ranging from highly idealized to experimentally based high-fidelity representations, are briefly reviewed. Structured and unstructured meshes are discussed. The main strategies for constitutive modelling of individual bulk grains and inter-granular interfaces are introduced. Some attention has also been devoted to three-dimensional multiscale approaches and some established and emerging applications have been discussed.

A full-field crystal-plasticity analysis of bimodal polycrystals

“…In this work, a complete full-field modelling of polycrystals with an explicit high-resolution representation of the grains is presented. A large set of applications with such an approach were presented in [33,34] and are extended here to constitutive modelling accounting for the effects of internal lengths. The article is organised as follows.…”

Computational Homogenization of Architectured Materials

“…As a matter of fact, advanced models are often restricted to a limited variety of materials. Although isotropic and anisotropic polycrystalline metals, for instance, have been extensively studied by the means of both analytical and computational tools [25,27,38,79,97,114,121,133,157], some material configurations (architectured materials, materials with infinite contrast of properties, nanocomposites, materials exhibiting nonlinear behaviour, etc.) call for further development of models and tools for describing their effective behaviour.…”

Multiscale modeling of polycrystalline materials: A boundary element approach to material degradation and fracture

“…In recent years, however, computational micromechanics has experienced a remarkable acceleration, due to the wider affordability of high performance parallel computing (HPC), thus favoring the advancement of the subject [18,19,20,21]. There are several scientific and technological reasons for the interest in truly 3D polycrystalline models [22,23,24,25,26]. 3D models allow to understand inherently 3D complex microstructural phenomena: the influence of the geometry on the microcracking evolution; the competition between different failure modes, e.g.…”