Plane wave simulation of elastic-viscoplastic single crystals

Despite the large amount of research that has been performed to quantify the high strain rate response of Aluminum, few studies have addressed effects of crystal orientation and subsequent crystal-level microstructure evolution on its high strain rate response. To study orientation effects in single crystal Al, both a constitutive model and novel numerical method have been developed. A plane wave formulation is developed so that materials undergoing anisotropic viscoplastic deformation can be modeled in a thermodynamically consistent framework. Then, a recently developed high strain rate viscoplastic model is extended to include single crystal effects by incorporating higher order crystal-based thermoelasticity, anisotropic plasticity kinetics, and distinguishing influences of forest and parallel dislocation densities. Steady propagating shock waves are simulated for [100], [110], and [111] oriented single crystals and compared to existing experimental wave profile and strength measurements. Finally, influences of initial orientation and peak pressure ranging from 0 to 30 GPa are quantified. Results indicate that orientation plays a significant role in dictating the high rate response of both the wave profile and the resultant microstructure evolution of Al. The plane wave formulation can be used to evaluate microstructure-sensitive constitutive relations in a computationally efficient framework. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.