Non-laminate microstructures in monoclinic-I martensite (Q1944710)

The authors study the cubic-to-monoclinic-I martensite phase transformation in shape-memory alloys in the context of geometrically-linear elasticity, described by twelve transformation strains. They determine the facets of the convex hull of the twelve transformation strains and observe that depending on lattice parameters, two qualitatively different polytope structures of the convex (and semi-convex) hull are possible. Curiously, for all experimentally observed so far monoclinic-I martensites, the polytope structure of their convex hulls is qualitatively the same, the authors call the microstructures of this type the monoclinic-Ia martensites. Of particular importance is the set of strains which can be recovered upon heating. In the variational approach to martensite, this set is modelled by the quasiconvex hull of the transformation strains. The quasiconvex hull is difficult to calculate, thus it is useful to have inner bounds for it. The authors study two types of inner bounds for the symmetrised quasiconvex hull of the transformation strains - the symmetrised lamination convex hull and the symmetrised rank-one convex hull. They show that the so-called T3s (non-trivial symmetrised rank-one convex hulls or 3-tuples of pairwise incompatible strains attained by non-laminate microstructures) can be formed from the twelve variants of monoclinic-I (and monoclinic-II) martensite for all (non-zero) values of a certain lattice parameter. As a consequence, they show that the symmetrised rank-one convex hull of the twelve transformation strains of the monoclinic-Ia martensite contains a five-dimensional continuum of points attained by non-laminate microstructures. This suggests that the symmetrised rank-one convex hull of the transformation strains of the monoclinic-Ia martensite is strictly larger than the symmetrised lamination convex hull.