Dislocation dynamics FE simulation of the Orowan precipitate bypass in a polycrystalline micropillar

This video illustrates a large-scale three-dimensional finite element computation carried out at ONERA using the Z-set finite element software using automatic adaptive remeshing strategies. An anisotropic copper polycrystalline micropillar with 80 grains is automatically generated from the intersection of a cuboid Voronoi tessellation with a representative pillar mesh, in which a shear dislocation loop glides in the (111) slip plane of a specific grain. A high compressive strain of 7.1% is applied, and maintained constant, on one face of the sample, while the opposite face is blocked. At the grain scale, the Orowan bypass mechanism is described by the presence of the infinitely stiff, also elastically mismatched precipitate of arbitrary shape, for which the elastic constants are fictitiously multiplied by a factor of ten, with impenetrable boundaries and without consideration of cross-slip events. Such a simulation required 19h14m of total computational time, using a 12 cores workstation, with 291 remeshing