A study of microstructural length scale effects on the behaviour of FCC polycrystals using strain gradient concepts

Grain size is a critically important aspect of polycrystalline materials and experimental observations on Cu and Al polycrystals have shown that a Hall–Petch-type phenomenon does exist at the onset of plastic deformation. In this work, a parametric study is conducted to investigate the effect of microstructural and deformation-related length scales on the behaviour of such FCC polycrystals. It relies on a recently proposed non-local dislocation-mechanics based crystallographic theory to describe the evolution of dislocation mean spacings within each grain, and on finite element techniques to incorporate explicitly grain interaction effects. Polycrystals are modeled as representative volume elements (RVEs) containing up to 64 randomly oriented grains. Predictions obtained from RVEs of Cu polycrystals with different grain sizes are shown to be consistent with experimental data. Furthermore, mesh sensitivity studies revealed that, when there is a predominance of geometrically necessary dislocations relative to statistically stored dislocations, the polycrystal response becomes increasingly mesh sensitive. This was found to occur especially during the early stages of deformation in polycrystals with small grains.