A Method to Incorporate Grain Boundary Strength and its Effects on Plastic Deformation in FCC Polycrystals

A three-dimensional (3D) crystal plasticity finite element method (CPFEM) is developed to investigate the effect of grain boundary strength on heterogeneous strain partitioning in FCC polycrystals. The proposed method incorporates electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) maps into finite element analyses. The numerical analysis accounts for crystallographic texture, its evolution and 3D grain morphologies. Furthermore, grain boundaries are also mapped with a special finite element framework that allows material properties to be assigned to the grain boundaries. The material parameters and the grain boundary strengths are obtained by calibration to experimental uniaxial tension curves for single and polycrystals. Numerical simulations of uniaxial tension are performed and the effects of grain boundary strength on the onset of non-uniform deformation is investigated. The predicted local strain evolution is compared with corresponding experimental results from digital image correlation (DIC) measurements of an AA5754 aluminium sheet. The results showed that an excellent agreement was reached when the grain boundary properties were set so that the hardness was five times that of the average polycrystal response.