A crystal plasticity approach was used to study the effects of grain shape and texture on the deformation behavior of friction stir weld (FSW) microregions. The explicit stress-strain analysis was performed for two representative grain structures with equiaxed and extended grains. Grain orientations were assigned to simulate no texture or a weak or strong cubic texture. Calculations have shown that the texture gave rise to earlier plastic strain localization on a larger scale. The highest stresses were found to develop in a non-textured specimen with equiaxed grains where the grain boundaries served as a barrier to dislocation motion. In both equiaxed and extended grain structures with a strong cubic texture no pronounced strain localization was seen on the grain scale but mesoscale shear bands appeared early in the deformation process. The calculations have shown that the microstructure-based simulation is a reasonable tool to study the deformation behavior of FSW materials, which is difficult to be predicted within macroscopic models alone.

The deformation behavior of aluminum single crystals subjected to compression along the [100] and [110] directions is numerically examined in terms of crystal plasticity. A constitutive model taking into account slip geometry in face-centered cubic crystals is developed using experimental data for the single-crystal samples with lateral sides coplanar to certain crystal planes. Two sets of calculations are performed using ABAQUS/Explicit to examine the features of plastic strain evolution in perfectly plastic and strain-hardened crystals. Special attention is given to the discussion of mechanical aspects of crystal fragmentation. Several distinct deformation stages are revealed in the calculations. In the first stage, narrow solitary fronts of plastic deformation are alternately formed near the top or bottom surfaces and then propagate towards opposite ends to save the symmetry of the crystal shape. The strain rate within the fronts is an order of magnitude higher than the average strain rate. The first stage lasts longer in the strain-hardened crystals, eventually giving way to an intermediate stage of multiple slips in different crystal parts. Finally, the crystal shape becomes asymmetrical, but no pronounced macroscopic strain localization has been revealed at any deformation stage. The second stage in perfectly plastic crystals relates to abrupt strain localization within a through-thickness band-shaped region, accompanied by macroscale crystal fragmentation. Stress analysis has shown that pure compression took place only in the first deformation stage. Once the crystal shape has lost its symmetry, the compressive stress in some regions progressively decreases to zero and eventually turns tensile.

The article presents a microstructure-based mechanical model of hexagonal close-packed (hcp) α-titanium representative of the mesoscale and analyzes the contribution of a pyramidal slip to plastic deformation. We discuss the size of a representative volume element (RVE) enabling mesoscale phenomena to be correctly reproduced, focusing on deformation-induced surface roughening (DISR) and plastic strain localization. It is shown that the ignorance of a pyramidal slip in simulations leads to overestimated stress values in an hcp material. A polycrystalline model is capable of reproducing the mesoscale phenomena until plastic strain begins to localize at the length scale comparable to the model size.

The phenomenon of mesoscale deformation-induced surface roughening in titanium polycrystals is examined experimentally and numerically. The evolution of the surface morphology under uniaxial tension is analyzed in terms of the standard and ad hoc roughness parameters and the fractal dimension. The statistical estimates are compared to the grain-scale stress-strain fields in order to reveal an interrelation between the in-plane plastic strains and out-of-plane surface displacements. A strong correlation with a determination coefficient of 0.99 is revealed between the dimensionless roughness parameter R_d and the corresponding in-plane plastic strain. The standard roughness parameters R_a and R_RMS are shown to correlate linearly with the in-plane strains, but only for moderate tensile deformation, which is due to filtering out low-frequency components in the surface profiles. The fractal dimension D_F changes with the subsection strains in a sawtooth fashion, with an abrupt drop in the neck region. The descent portions of the D_F dependences are supposedly related to the appearance of low-frequency components in the structure of the surface profiles.