A study of particle size effect and interface fracture in aluminum alloy composite via an extended conventional theory of mechanism-based strain-gradient plasticity

Recent experiments have shown that the particle-reinforced composites display significant particle size effect. The classical plasticity theories have no intrinsic material lengths and cannot explain the observed size effects. The strain-gradient plasticity theories have been applied to study the particle size effects in composites, but they tend to predict the stress–strain curves in uniaxial tension that are lower than the experimental data …