Athermal mechanisms of size-dependent crystal flow gleaned from three-dimensional discrete dislocation simulations Original Research Article

Recent experimental studies have revealed that micrometer-scale face-centered cubic (fcc) crystals show strong strengthening effects, even at high initial dislocation densities. We use large-scale three-dimensional discrete dislocation simulations (DDS) to explicitly model the deformation behavior of fcc Ni microcrystals in the size range of 0.5–20 μm. This study shows that two size-sensitive athermal hardening processes, beyond forest hardening, are sufficient to develop the dimensional scaling of the flow stress, stochastic stress variation, flow intermittency and high initial strain-hardening rates, similar to experimental observations for various materials. One mechanism, source-truncation hardening, is especially potent in micrometer-scale volumes. A second mechanism, termed exhaustion hardening, results from a breakdown of the mean-field conditions for forest hardening in small volumes, thus biasing the statistics of ordinary dislocation processes.