A study was made of the idea that the evolution of self-organizing dislocation cells was governed by random fluctuations in the cell orientations. The evolution of dislocation-cell misorientation distributions during deformation was treated on the basis that noise caused the cell orientations to walk randomly in orientation-space. The orientational equivalent of Fick’s second law was then solved so as to obtain a time-dependent solution for the orientation distribution, misorientation distribution and strain-dependence of the average misorientation angle. In the low-angle limit, the average misorientation was proportional to the square root of the strain, and the misorientation distribution scaled with the average misorientation angle; in agreement with experimental data. The analysis predicted an infinite number of possible scaling states, rather than a universal curve, as seen in practice.

Scaling of Dislocation Cell Structures - Diffusion in Orientation Space. M.A.Miodownik, P.Smereka, D.J.Srolovitz, E.A.Holm: Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 2001, 457[2012], 1807-19