Multi-scale modelling of deformation and failure of polycrystalline materials under high-rate loading conditions

The modelling of deformation and failure under high-rate loading conditions is hindered by the complexity and localised nature of plasticity and crack propagation. Whilst the accurate simulation of these phenomena requires a relatively fine discretisation, the size of the domain affected, in industrial and practical applications, can be too large to simulate with the required level of detail, even with the currently available computational power.

In this talk, the capability of providing the mesoscale response of a wide range of metallic materials will be discussed, showing the combination of the ability to generate statistically representative digital twins of real polycrystalline microstructures with the in-house developed methods for the computationally efficient modelling of crystal plasticity and inter-granular crack propagation. Additionally, the developed framework for the homogenisation and upscaling of the mesoscale response into macroscopic constitutive model formulations will be presented.

This workflow can be applied to either predict the macroscopic behaviour of materials from directly measured properties at the lower scale (e.g. grain size distribution, critical resolved shear stresses, grain boundaries strength), or to reverse engineer the properties at the mesoscale (e.g. defect distribution) from results of macroscopic experimental tests.