Energetic solutions to rate-independent large-strain elasto-plastic evolutions driven by discrete dislocation flow (Q6963505)

The author implements a model presented in his paper with \textit{T. Hudson} [Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci. 32, No. 5, 851--910 (2022; Zbl 1524.74087)] concerning the elasto-plastic evolution of single crystals driven by dislocation lines. He starts recalling the notions of dislocation systems as collections of dislocation lines, indexed by their Burgers vector which is constant along a dislocation line, and of slip trajectories that describe the evolution of a dislocation system. He recalls the model previously introduced. In its reference configuration, a material is filling a domain \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^{3}\), the total deformation \(y:[0,T]\times \Omega \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{3}\), is supposed to satisfy the orientation-preserving condition \(\det\nabla y(t)>0\) pointwise in \(\Omega \) for any time \(t\in \lbrack 0,T]\). Working in the large-strain and geometrically nonlinear regime, the deformation gradient splits according to the Kröner decomposition: \(\nabla y=EP\) into an elastic distortion \( E:[0,T]\times \Omega \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{3\times 3}\) and a plastic distortion \(P:[0,T]\times \Omega \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{3\times 3}\) with \( \det E>0\) and \(\det P=1\), pointwise a.e. in \(\Omega \). All dislocation lines with Burgers vector \(b\in \mathcal{B}\) that are contained in the material at time \(t\) are collected in a 1-dimensional integral current \(T^{b}(t)\) on \( \overline{\Omega }\). To describe the time evolution of \(T^{b}(t)\), the author introduces a slip trajectory as a two-dimensional integral current \( S^{b}\) with the property that \(\partial S^{b}\llcorner ((0,T)\times \mathbb{R }^{3})=0\). The dislocation system at time \(t\) is given by \(T^{b}(t)=p_{\ast }(S^{b}\mid _{t})\), where \(p_{\ast }\) is the spatial projection of the slice \(S^{b}\mid _{t}\) of \(S^{b}\) at time \(t\). The thickened slip trajectory \( S_{\eta }^{b}\) is obtained as the spatial convolution \(S_{\eta }^{b}=\eta \ast S^{b}\) between the dislocation line profile \(\eta \in C_{c}^{\infty }( \mathbb{R}^{3};[0,\infty ))\). The plastic distortion \(P\) follows the plastic flow equation: \(\frac{dP}{dt}(t,x)=D(t,x,P(t,x);(S^{b})_{b})=\frac{1}{2}\sum_{b\in \mathcal{B}}b\otimes\mathrm{proj}_{(P(t,x)^{-1})b^{\perp }}[\star \gamma ^{b}(t,x)]\), where the spatial 2-vector \(\gamma ^{b}(t,x)\in \wedge _{2}\mathbb{R}^{3}\) is the density of the measure \(p(S_{\eta }^{b})=p(\overrightarrow{S}_{\eta }^{b})\left\Vert S_{\eta }^{b}\right\Vert \) and \(\star \) denotes the Hodge star operation. The author assumes that \(y(t)\) is a minimizer of \(\mathcal{W}_{e}(\cdot ,P(t))=\int_{\Omega }W_{e}(\nabla \cdot P^{-1}(t))dx\) for all \(t\in \lbrack 0,T]\), the energy density \(W_{e}\) satisfying polyconvexity, (mild) growth and continuity conditions. He introduces the core energy as \( \mathcal{W}_{c}((T^{b})_{b})=\frac{\zeta }{2}\sum_{b\in \mathcal{B}}M(T^{b})\) , where \(\zeta >0\) and \(M(T^{b})=\left\Vert T^{b}\right\Vert (\mathbb{R}^{3}) \) is the mass of the current \(T^{b}\), i.e., the total length of all lines contained in \(T^{b}\). Given an external loading \(f:[0,T]\times \Omega \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{3}\), the total energy is \(\mathcal{E} (t,y,P(T^{b})_{b})=\mathcal{W}_{e}(y,P)-\int_{\Omega }f(t,x)\cdot y(x)dx+\mathcal{W}_{c}((T^{b})_{b})\). The dissipation is defined as \(Var(S^{b};[s,t])=\int_{[s,t]\times \mathbb{R} ^{3}}\left\vert p(\overrightarrow{S}^{b})\right\vert \left\Vert dS^{b}\right\Vert \), where \(S^{b}=\overrightarrow{S}^{b}\left\Vert S^{b}\right\Vert \) is the Radon-Nikodym decomposition of the integral current \(S^{b}\) into its orienting 2-vector \(\overrightarrow{S}^{b}\in L^{\infty }(\left\Vert S^{b}\right\Vert ; \wedge _{2}\mathbb{R}^{1+3})\) and the total variation measure \(\left\Vert S^{b}\right\Vert \in \mathcal{M} ^{+}((0,T)\times \mathbb{R}^{3})\). The dissipation along a slip trajectory \( S^{b}\) from \(s\) to \(t\) is given as: \(\int_{[s,t]\times \mathbb{R} ^{3}}R^{b}(Pp(\overrightarrow{S}^{b}))\left\Vert dS^{b}\right\Vert \), where the function \(R^{b}:\wedge _{2}\mathbb{R}^{3}\rightarrow \lbrack 0,\infty )\) is the convex and 1-homogeneous dissipation potential which may be anisotropic and \(b\)-dependent, and which satisfies the bounds \( C^{-1}\left\vert \xi \right\vert \leq R^{b}(\xi )\leq C\left\vert \xi \right\vert \), with a positive constant \(C\) that is independent of \(b\). The relation linking plastic distortion rates and the corresponding stresses is given by the flow rule \(P^{-\intercal }X^{b}\in \partial R^{b}(P\gamma ^{b})\) , where \(\gamma ^{b}\) is the geometric slip rate, \(P\gamma ^{b}\) the pushforward of the 2-vector \(\gamma ^{b}\) under \(P\), and \(R^{b}\) the dissipation potential. Neglecting the core energy, the configurational stress can be expressed as \(X^{b}=\star b^{\intercal }MP^{-\intercal }\), where \(M\) is the Mandel stress (structural plastic stress): \(M=P^{-\intercal }(\nabla y)^{\intercal }DW_{e}(\nabla yP^{-1})\). The author rigorously defines the basic kinematic and dynamic objects of the model: the dislocation systems: \(\mathrm{Disl}(\overline{\Omega })=\{T=(T^{b})_{b\in \mathcal{B}}\subset I_{1}(\overline{\Omega }):T^{-b}=T^{b}\), \(\partial T^{b}=0\) for all \(b\in \mathcal{B}\}\), where \(I_{1}(\overline{\Omega })\) is the set of all integral 1-currents supported in \(\overline{\Omega }\), the set of Lipschitz slip trajectories: \(\mathrm{Lip}([0,T]; \mathrm{Disl}(\overline{\Omega }))=\{S=(S^{b})_{b\in \mathcal{B}}\subset I_{2}([0,T]\times \overline{\Omega }):S^{b}\in I_{1+1}^{\mathrm{Lip}}([0,T]\times \overline{\Omega })\), \(S^{-b}=TS^{b}\), and \( \partial S^{b}\llcorner ((0,T)\times \mathbb{R}^{d})=0\}\), and the dislocation forward operator for \(T=(T^{b})_{b\in \mathcal{B}}\in\mathrm{Disl}( \overline{\Omega })\) and \(S=(S^{b})_{b\in \mathcal{B}}\in\mathrm{Slip}(T)\) as \( S_{\gg }=(T_{\gg }^{b})_{b}2\in \mathrm{Disl}(\overline{\Omega })\), with \(T_{\gg }^{b}=p_{\ast }[\partial S^{b}+\delta _{0}\times T^{b}]\in I_{1}(\overline{ \Omega })\). He considers how slip trajectories give rise to an evolution of the plastic distortion. He presents the assumptions on the energy and dissipation functionals and two examples of such situations. He defines the notion of energetic solutions: The pair \((y,z)\) with \(y\in L^{\infty }([0,\infty ); W_{g}^{1,p}(\Omega ;\mathbb{R}^{3}))\); \(z=(P,S)\in\mathrm{Lip}([0,\infty ); W^{1,q}(\Omega ; \mathbb{R}^{3\times 3}))\times\mathrm{Lip}([0,\infty ); \mathrm{Disl}(\overline{\Omega }))\) is called an energetic solution to the system of dislocation-driven elasto-plasticity with rescaling function \(\psi :[0,\infty )\rightarrow \lbrack 0,T]\), which is Lipschitz continuous, increasing, and satisfies \(\psi (0)=0\), \(\psi (\infty )=T_{\ast }\in (0,T]\), if for all \(s\in \lbrack 0,\infty )\) a stability condition, an energy balance and the plastic flow hold. The main result of the paper proves the existence of an energetic solution to the system of dislocation-driven elasto-plasticity, under appropriate hypotheses on the initial data. For the proof, the authors gathers several properties of the energy and dissipation functionals and he translates the weak\(^{\ast }\)-convergence of dislocation systems into a slip trajectory connecting these dislocation systems to their limit.\ He proposes a time-incremental approximation scheme: Given a uniform partition \((t_{k}^{N})_{k=0,\ldots ,N}\) of \([0,T]\), Find \( (y_{k}^{N},S_{k}^{N})\) which minimizes \(\mathcal{E}(t_{k}^{N},\widehat{y}, \widehat{S}_{\gg }z_{k-1}^{N})+\mathrm{Disl}(\widehat{S})\) over all \(\widehat{y}\in \mathcal{Y}\), \(\widehat{S}\in\mathrm{Slip}(z_{k-1}^{N})\) with \(\left\Vert \widehat{S} \right\Vert _{\infty }\leq \gamma \), \(z_{k}^{N}=(S_{k}^{N})_{\gg }z_{k-1}^{N} \), for some constant \(\gamma \). He proves the existence of a solution \( (y_{k}^{N},z_{k}^{N},S_{k}^{N})\) to this time incremental minimization problem for all \(k=0,\ldots ,N\). He proves a discrete lower energy estimate and a discrete stability result, that allow passing the limit on this discrete solution.