Plastic flow during the thermally activated motion of dislocations is primarily governed by the movement of dislocations, which will encounter obstacles in the form of short-range and long-range barriers during their motion. Long-range barriers are non-temperature-dependent and are influenced by factors such as grain boundaries, far-field forest dislocations, and other microstructural elements [
3,
15]. These barriers can impact dislocation motion through mechanisms such as externally applied stress or chemical potential differences. Conversely, the height of short-range barriers is closely related to temperature. At absolute zero temperature (0 K), the height of short-range barriers reaches its maximum value because there is no thermal energy available for dislocations to overcome them. However, the atomic vibration amplitude in the material increases with temperature rising, thereby reducing the height of the short-range barriers. This increase in thermal energy assists dislocations in overcoming the short-range barriers [
3]. Therefore, short-range barriers can be overcome through a thermal activation mechanism. In FCC metals, short-range barriers may include forest dislocations, point defects (such as vacancies and self-interstitials), solute atoms, impurities, and precipitates. The presence of these short-range barriers plays a significant role in plastic deformation and the mechanical properties of materials. Thus, based on the nature of barriers and the theory of MTS, the flow stress of a material can be expressed as [
10]:
2.1. Thermal stress
The thermal stress is closely related to the microstructural features of the material, as it utilizes the thermal vibrations of the crystal lattice to assist dislocations in overcoming weak barriers (such as forest dislocations and Peierls barriers). This facilitates the diffusion or glide of dislocations, resulting in material deformation.
2.1.1. Thermal activation effect in fixed structures
In the mechanism of thermally activated dislocation motion, the average waiting time of dislocations before encountering short-range barriers can be expressed in a modified form of Arrhenius equation [
17]:
where, v0 represents the vibration frequency (~ 1011 s-1) of the dislocation before encountering barriers [23], kB is the Boltzmann constant, T is the temperature, and ΔG is the thermal activation free energy (Gibbs free energy) required for dislocations to overcome the barriers, which is a function associated with the shape of the barrier (e.g., rectangular, square, triangular, parabolic, exponential) as well as stress. The modified form indicates that the waiting time for dislocations in a continuous slip system (ΔG = 0) is zero.
Kocks and Ashby proposed a general expression for activation energy:
where, G0 is the reference free energy at 0 K (=g0μ0b3, g0 is the normalized free energy, μ0 is the shear modulus (=μ(0K)), b is the magnitude of Burgers vector). p and q are a pair of parameters that characterize the shape of the barrier. q corresponds to the shape of the short-range barrier, where for a quasi-parabolic barrier, the range is 1 ≤ q ≤ 2. p describes the rate of decay of the field at longer distances, with a value of 0 < p ≤ 1. A value of p = 1 indicates no decay, while smaller values indicate faster decay of the activation energy at longer distances.
During the thermal activation stage, the time required for dislocations to overcome barriers is primarily determined by the waiting time of tw. According to Orowan's law (γ=Nmb·Δl), the equivalent true strain rate can be expressed as follows:
where, Δl represents the average distance traveled by dislocations between barriers, Nm denotes the mobile dislocation density. In the high strain rate regime, the mobile dislocation density dominates the total dislocation density, that is Nm = Ntot [2,24]. M is the Taylor factor, where σ=Mτ, ε=γ/M, τ and γ represent the shear stress and strain, respectively. The reference strain rate is defined as = Nmb·Δlv0/M with general order of 107 s-1 [10]。
By substituting Eq.(4) into Eq.(3), and considering the relationship of , the following expression is obtained:
when the temperature exceeds the critical temperature Tcr, the thermal activation stress term disappears, and the flow stress is solely determined by the athermal stress component, that is σ=σath. The expression for the critical temperature is given by:
2.1.2. Microstructural evolution
Based on the analysis of microstructural evolution in deformation processing experiments, one of the key features of metal deformation is the variation of cell size with strain. Sevillano's experimental results demonstrate that the cell size decreases with increasing equivalent plastic strain. For certain metals, the ratio of the average cell size δ to its saturated size δs is a function of equivalent plastic strain, and the data points cluster around a curve that is independent of the metal type [26]. The normalized cell size , defined as the ratio of the average cell size to its initial value , can be described by the following evolution equation:
where, δr is a dimensionless coefficient that represents the rate of cell refinement, while denotes the normalized saturated cell size (=δs/δ0). Both are functions related to strain rate and temperature. It is worth noting that this study is consistent with the theoretical framework proposed by Molinari and Ravichandran [20], which suggests that δ is a generalized characteristic length of the microstructure and does not have a direct relationship with geometric dimensions. Therefore, the use of dimensionless size captures the essential trends in simulating microstructural evolution, where specific cell sizes of δ, δ0, and δs become less important, and there is no need to precisely capture quantitative results regarding the microstructure.
The integral Eq.(7) yields the normalized cell size , denoted as:
The coefficients and δr can be expressed using the following empirical relationships [16]:
where, Tr and represent the reference temperature and strain rate, respectively. as and ar are non-negative constants, and ξs, νs, ξr, νr are constant values ranging from 0 to 1, controlling the dependence of and δr on strain rate and temperature. represents the maximum reference saturated cell size δs0 in comparison to its initial size (), while δr0 is the minimum reference refinement rate (δr0≤δr). The normalized saturated cell size decreases with increasing deformation rate and increases with elevated temperature. Conversely, the cell refinement rate δr accelerates with higher deformation rates and decelerates with increasing temperature. The evolution of these two parameters indicates that under low-temperature and high-strain-rate conditions, the dynamic cell refinement rate is faster, resulting in smaller achievable saturated sizes. In Eq.(9), a modification is made to the temperature term, suggesting that the evolution of cell size becomes insensitive to temperature when it is lower than Tr.
Staker and Holt proposed a simple relationship between the average cell size δ and the average total dislocation density Ntot, which can be expressed as follows:
where, Kc is a material constant, with a value of 16 for OFHC.
Therefore, the square root of the normalized dislocation density is inversely proportional to the normalized cell size :
By substituting the saturation value into equation (11), the normalized initial saturated cell size = √N0/Ns0 can be obtained, where Ns0 represents the minimum reference value (~ 1014 m-2 [28]) of the saturated dislocation density.
2.1.3. Threshold stress and thermal stress
In the theory of MTS, the threshold stress associated with thermal activation is related to microstructural evolution and can be expressed in combination with Eq.(11) as:
where, represents the intensity of dislocation interaction (< 1), and μ(T) is the temperature-dependent shear modulus. represents a constant threshold stress value associated with the initial microstructure state at 0 K.
By substituting Eq.(8) into Eq.(12) and combining it with Eq.(5), the thermal activation stress can be expressed as:
here, is the normalized shear modulus (=μ(T)/μ0). The thermal activation stress consists of two components: the structural evolution (threshold stress) part and the strain rate and temperature response of the material under fixed structure. The structural evolution (normalized cell size) is related to strain rate and temperature. Therefore, the strain rate sensitivity of the thermal activation stress can be divided into two parts: the rate sensitivity of material strain hardening caused by structural evolution and the instantaneous rate sensitivity of stress [12,29].
Eq.(13) can also be written in the standard Voce-Kocks format [
30]:
where, and represent the saturation and initial thermal activation stresses, respectively, with the following dependencies on strain rate and temperature:
2.2. Athermal stress
The athermal stress is a result of the interaction between dislocations and long-range obstacles, known as the Hall-Petch strengthening effect [
12]. The long-range obstacles mainly include thermally independent grain boundaries and far-field forest dislocations. As the grain size decreases (~ μm), the number of grain boundaries increases, or the density of far-field forest dislocations increases with increasing deformation. These long-range obstacles hinder dislocation motion and capture more dislocations, thereby enhancing the material strength [
31,
32].
The Hall-Petch strengthening effect caused by the grain size effect can be expressed as follows [
32,
33]:
where, σ0 represents the friction stress required for the motion of dislocations, which is typically negligible for FCC metals. ks is the strengthening coefficient, and D0 is the initial grain size.
The density of far-field forest dislocations Nf can be calculated using the rate-independent dislocation density evolution equation proposed by Klepaczko [12], where the effective forest dislocation density is represented as:
where, MII and ka0 are constants representing the proliferation rate and annihilation rate of dislocations, respectively. As the strain increases, the effective dislocation density approaches a saturation value, which is .
The athermal stress can be expressed as [
1,
29]:
here, B represents the stress at the saturation dislocation density at 0 K, denoted as B = αdμ0b, and αd is a material constant (< 1). The athermal stress indirectly achieves the thermal softening effect of the material through the relationship between the shear modulus (elastic field) and temperature. It realizes strain hardening of the material through the generation and storage of dislocations during deformation, while the deformation rate does not affect the evolution of non-thermal stress.
2.3. Flow stress and hardening rate
Finally, combining Eq.(13) and Eq.(18), the constitutive relationship for the flow stress of FCC metals is obtained as:
The strain hardening rate with respect to stress is given by:
where, the first term represents the strain hardening rate induced by the evolution of long-range obstacles in the microstructure, such as grain size and grain boundaries. The hardening rate initially decreases inversely proportional to the athermal stress and follows a linear function with a constant slope ka0 at higher stresses. The second term accounts for the strain hardening rate due to thermal stress arising from the evolution of short-range obstacles, such as line defects represented by dislocation spacing. Under stable loading conditions, the hardening rate decreases linearly as the thermal stress increases, where δr is a constant.
Observing the model's behavior under constant loading conditions (stable strain rate and temperature), the overall strain hardening rate exhibits a rapid decrease as the deformation intensifies due to the inverse proportional function, reflecting the hardening characteristics of FCC metals at stage III [11,26]. Once the material reaches a certain level of strengthening, the overall strain hardening rate gradually decreases linearly until it approaches zero, with a slope approximately equal to −(ka0 + δr). This behavior is consistent with the hardening characteristics of stage IV [26,34]. Since ka0 is a material constant, the sensitivity of the hardening rate to strain rate and temperature primarily depends on the microstructural refinement rate δr.