Asymptotic analysis of a pile-up of regular edge dislocation walls

The idealised problem of a pile-up of regular dislocation walls (that is, of planes each containing an infinite number of parallel, identical and equally spaced dislocations) was presented by Roy et al. [A. Roy, R.H.J. Peerlings, M.G.D. Geers, Y. Kasyanyuk, Materials Science and Engineering A 486 (2008) 653–661] as a prototype for understanding the importance of discrete dislocation interactions in dislocation-based plasticity models. They noted that analytic solutions for the dislocation wall density are available for a pile-up of regular screw dislocation walls, but that numerical methods seem to be necessary for investigating regular edge dislocation walls. In this paper, we use the techniques of discrete-to-continuum asymptotic analysis to obtain a detailed description of a pile-up of regular edge dislocation walls. To leading order, we find that the dislocation wall density is governed by a simple differential equation and that boundary layers are present at both ends of the pile-up.