Simulation of shock-induced plasticity including homogeneous and heterogeneous dislocation nucleations

A model of plasticity that couples discrete dislocation dynamics and finite element analysis is used to investigate shock-induced dislocation nucleation in copper single crystals. Homogeneous nucleation of dislocations is included based on large-scale atomistic shock simulations. The resulting prodigious rate of dislocation production takes the uniaxialy compressed material to a hydrostatically compressed state after a few tens of picoseconds. The density of dislocations produced in a sample with preexisting dislocation sources decreases slightly as shock rise time increases, implying that relatively lower densities would be expected for isentropic loading using extremely long rise times as suggested experimentally. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.