A Novel Numerical Formulation for Crystal Plasticity

Crystal plasticity plays a crucial role in the mechanics of polycrystalline materials and it is commonly modeled within the framework of the crystal plasticity finite element method (CPFEM). In this work, an alternative formulation for small strains crystal plasticity is presented. The method is based on a boundary integral formulation for polycrystalline problems and plasticity is addressed using an initial strains approach. Voronoi-type micro-morphologies are considered in the polycrystalline case. A general grain-boundary incremental/iterative algorithm, embedding the flow and hardening rules for crystal plasticity, is developed. The key feature of the method is the expression of the micro-mechanical problem in terms of inter-granular variables only, resulting in a reduction of the number of DoFs, which may be appealing in multi-scale applications. Some numerical results, showing the potential of the technique, are presented and discussed.