A general formalism was presented for incorporating dislocations into phase field methods, based upon the elastic equivalence between a dislocation loop and a platelet inclusion of specific stress-free strain. Dislocations may be elastically and dynamically coupled to any other field such as a concentration field. Special attention was paid to the treatment of dislocation cores after the discretization of real and reciprocal space required by the computer implementation of any phase field methods. In particular, a method based upon 2 length scales was proposed in order to account for dislocation cores which were much smaller than the grid spacing. The method was illustrated by simulation of the motion of a dislocation loop in a microstructure representing a late-stage γ/γ’ microstructure.

Phase Field Methods and Dislocations. D.Rodney, Y.Le Bouar, A.Finel: Acta Materialia, 2003, 51[1], 17-30