An investigation of slip transmission during uniaxial tensile deformation of a coarse-grained copper via EBSD characterization and crystal plasticity modelling

This study explores the phenomenon of slip transmission across grain boundaries in coarse-grained copper. The associated effects on the deformation gradient are also investigated, using both experiment and simulation. An in-situ tensile test of a fully annealed copper specimen was conducted first using a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The deformation gradient and geometrically necessary dislocation (GND) maps at selected tensile strain values were obtained and characterized by electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD). In addition, a physically based strain gradient crystal plasticity finite element method model has been developed to simulate the early stage of tensile deformation behaviour of copper. In this model, slip transmission across the grain boundary is either allowed or blocked, depending on the alignment of adjacent grains. Slip transmission is allowed at grain boundaries between suitably aligned grains according to the Luster-Morris factor, residual Burgers vector is applied to consider the slip misalignment at GB region, and dislocation accumulation at grain boundaries is included following the Kocks-Mecking law. It was found that dislocation pile-up, lattice rotation and stress concentration were much higher near the impenetrable grain boundaries than at the penetrable ones. Due to the slip transmissions across grain boundaries, the stress and strain concentrations can be partially relaxed, and the slip transmission induced relaxation is associated with the number of active slip systems and shear strain on the best aligned slip systems. This study provides an effective strategy to investigate the early stage of plastic deformation, and a good agreement between experimental observations and simulation results has been achieved.