Investigation of the grain-scale deformation in a polycrystalline aluminum alloy

A finite element based crystal plasticity implementation is employed to study an aluminum polycrystal subjected to uniaxial loading. The emphasis is put on the effect of the representation of the microstructure on the strain accumulation and intra-granular misorientation field. To better capture the crystal-scale behavior, each grain in the mesh is discretized into many finite elements. It is found that irregular tessellations based on Voronoi schemes provide similar responses whereas regular solids show some differences. An extended investigation of the role of the grain boundaries in the development of strain heterogeneity and in the re-orientation of parts of the grains is also provided according to an original averaging procedure