Statistics of the Catastrophic Slip Events in the Portevin–Le Châtelier Effect

The statistics of catastrophic slip associated with discontinuous yielding (the Portevin–Le Châtelier effect) is investigated on an Al-Mg alloy. It is shown that a peaked distribution of stress drops changes towards a monotonic one, characterized by a power law with an exponent of -1.1, with increasing temperature and rate of straining. A model describing this behavior is studied, and it is suggested that there exists a formal similarity of the …