A dislocation-based constitutive description for modeling the behavior of FCC metals within wide ranges of strain rate and temperature

In this work a dislocation based constitutive description for modeling the thermo visco plastic behavior of FCC metals has been developed. The constitutive description, which is founded on the concepts of thermal activation analysis and dislocation dynamics, assumes the plastic flow additively decomposed into internal stress and effective stress. The internal stress represents the applied stress required for the transmission of plastic flow between the polycrystal grains and it is defined by the Hall Petch relationship. The effective stress formulation, which is the main innovative feature of this work, represents the thermally activated deformation behavior. This is defined taking into account the interrelationship between strain rate and temperature, and gathers structural evolution dependence. This structural evolution is described as a function of dislocations density, which acts as internal state variable in the material deformation behavior. A systematic procedure for identifica tion of the material parameters is developed and the model is applied to define the behav ior of annealed OFHC copper. The analytical predictions of the constitutive description are compared with the experimental data reported by Nemat Nasser and Li (Nemat Nasser, S., Li, Y., (1998). Flow stress of FCC polycrystals with application to OFHC Copper. Acta Mater. 46, 565 577). Good correlation between experiments and analytical predictions is found within wide ranges of strain rate and temperature.The researchers of the University Carlos III of Madrid are indebted to the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid (Pro ject CCG10 UC3M/DPI 5596) and to the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España (Project DPI/2008 06408) for the financial support received which allowed conduct ing part of this work.Publicad