Polycristalline Plasticity

The first developments on this topic, carried out during my PhD, consist in assessing thermomechanical couplings at the microstructural scale [1, 2] in order to link plasticity-induced damage with thermal dissipation at the scale where it manifests [3]. Beyond highlighting the effect of grain orientation and misorientation on the polycrystalline response [5, 7], the conducted work suggests that consideration of energy balances at the microstructural scale is a route worth pursuing in order to investigate plastic localization and damage in polycrystals [10]. Further work, started during my post-doc, focuses on the relationship between microstructural features—such as grain size and orientation—and plastic localization, under both static and dynamic loading [4, 6, 11]. Finally, since microstructures contain thousands of grains, a statistical treatment of grain characteristics—including actual (i.e., three-component) orientation and misorientation data—appears essential to better understand the link between microstructural features and plastic localization [18] as well as to provide information on whether two textures can be considered similar [8].