LAUSR

Abstract Since the 1950s, a large body of work has been published on connecting the curvature of a crystal lattice to geometrically necessary dislocations densities of a crystal lattice. Studying dislocation transmission through grains and across their boundaries requires the lattice curvature to be preserved. However, traditional crystal plasticity models and their numerical implementations do not formally preserve lattice curvature. In this paper, a continuous crystal lattice orientation finite element method (LOFEM) is proposed to rectify this impediment to the inclusion of dislocation-based constitutive models. The methodology is first presented, and then it is demonstrated for tension and compression deformations of a copper polycrystal. It is shown that under the same deformation histories, the lattice continuity constraint alters the evolving state in comparison to the traditional approach, including retarding the rate at which the crystallographic texture strengthens under monotonic deformation. Taking advantage of the finite element representation of the lattice orientation, the Nye tensor is computed on lattices misoriented by deformation and is subsequently used to compute evolving dislocation density distributions.