Title: Plasticity: Bridging the Scales from Micro to Macro
Organizer(s) / Affiliation(s): Shailendra Pramod Joshi, National University of Singapore, Jaafar A. El-Awady, Johns Hopkins University, Amit Acharya, Carnegie Mellon University
Email: shailendra@nus.edu.sg, jelawady@jhu.edu, acharyaamit@cmu.edu
Abstract: With emerging needs of developing lightweight structures, conventional metals are being re-engineered to make them stiffer, stronger and more ductile. Unfortunately, it may not be possible to improve all of these attributes simultaneously. In fact, many times an improvement in one is usually at the cost of some of the other properties. For example, while it is common to observe impressive improvements in strength in metals by refining the grain size to the limit of amorphization, it usually comes at the cost of severe reduction in the ductility. Novel experimental techniques such as in-situ TEM imaging, micro-scale testing, etc., have enabled understanding of the size-dependent physics and mechanics of plasticity at the fundamental length-scales. However, a critical evaluation of complicating aspects of plasticity becomes possible only through high-fidelity computational simulations. This is so because in experiments it is not easy to isolate the synergies between the unit processes (e.g. dislocations interactions) that contribute to the overall deformation. A broad aim of this minisymposium is to bring together researchers from the engineering and physical sciences to create a forum that will discuss modern insights into the physics and mechanics of plasticity at multiple length- and time-scales. The topics of interest include atomistics and discrete dislocation dynamics of interacting effects between dislocations and other defects, hierarchical material systems, (e.g. nanotwinned metals, nanocomposites), and bridging the scales. Of particular interest are studies that synchronize between experimental multi-scale characterization and mechanism-based multi-scale models for plasticity at fundamental length-scales.
