Phase field crystal study of deformation and plasticity in nanocrystalline materials

Abstract

We introduce a modified phase field crystal (MPFC) technique that self-consistently incorporates rapid strain relaxation alongside the usual plastic deformation and multiple crystal orientations featured by the traditional phase field crystal (PFC) technique. Our MPFC formalism can be used to study a host of important phase transformation phenomena in material processing that require rapid strain relaxation. We apply the MPFC model to study elastic and plastic deformations in nanocrystalline materials, focusing on the "reverse" Hall-Petch effect. Finally, we introduce a multigrid algorithm for efficient numerical simulations of the MPFC model.