Coarse-grained elastodynamics of fast moving dislocations

Abstract The fundamental mechanism of dynamic plasticity in metallic materials subjected to shock loading remains unclear because it is difficult to obtain the precise information of individual fast moving dislocations in metals from the state-of-the-art experiments. In this work, the dynamics of sonic dislocations in anisotropic crystalline materials is explored through a concurrent atomistic-continuum modeling method. We make a first attempt to characterize the complexity of nonuniformly moving dislocations in anisotropic crystals from atomistic to microscale, including the energy intensities as well as the wavelengths of acoustic phonons emitted from sonic dislocations, and the velocity-dependent stress fluctuations around the core of nonuniformly moving dislocations. Instantaneous dislocation velocities and phonon drag effects on the dislocation motions are quantified and analyzed. Mach cones in a V-shaped pattern of the phonon wave-fronts are observed in the wake of the sonic dislocations. Analysis of simulation results based on a wavelet transform show that the faster a dislocation is moving, the longer the emitted phonon wavelength. The dislocation velocity drops dramatically with the occurrence of the interactions between dislocations and phonon waves reflected from the boundaries of specimens. The concurrent atomistic-continuum modeling framework is demonstrated to be the first multiscale method that explicitly treats the strong coupling between the long-range elastic fields away from the dislocation core, the highly nonlinear time-dependent stress field within the core, and the evolutions of the atomic-scale dislocation core structures. As such, it is shown that this method is capable in predicting elastodynamics of dislocations in the presence of inertia effects associated with sonic dislocations in micron-sized anisotropic crystalline materials from the atomic level, which is not directly accessible to the recent elastodynamic discrete dislocation model.