Inelastic rotations and pseudo-turbulent plastic avalanches in crystals

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mesoscopic model demonstrating how large lattice rotations in crystals can arise from coordinated slip events, revealing pseudo-turbulent dislocation avalanches with scale-invariant correlations.

Contribution

It presents a novel Landau-type model linking microscale slip to large-scale rotations and uncovers pseudo-turbulent avalanche behavior in crystal plasticity.

Findings

Large lattice rotations can originate from coordinated inelastic slip.

Dislocation avalanches exhibit pseudo-turbulent motions.

Spatial correlations follow power-law distributions.

Abstract

Plastic deformations in crystals often produce textures in the form of randomly oriented patches of the unstressed lattice. We use a novel mesoscopic Landau-type model of crystal plasticity to show that in such textures large crystallographic lattice rotations can originate from a highly coordinated inelastic slip at the microscale. Our numerical experiments show that dislocation avalanches, which lead to the formation of such rotations, involve pseudo-turbulent motions with power-law distributed spatial correlations.