Recent work was described in which temporal and spatial coarse-grain strategies were identified that linked mesoscale and continuum treatments. Three distinct examples were considered. One was the impact of solute-dislocation interactions upon dislocation mobility (including pinning effects). Another involved thermally induced dislocation interactions. The third involved dislocation structures and properties at spatially coarse scales; mainly in 2 dimensions. In the latter case, a continuum Hamiltonian was formulated and the corresponding macro-variable set (including the dislocation density and its gradients) was identified that was relevant at each level of the coarse-grain hierarchy. The aim was to show how these apparently unrelated problems could be viewed as being part of a unified picture of coarse-grained dislocation behavior.

Coarse-Grained Descriptions of Dislocation Behaviour. R.LeSar, J.M.Rickman: Philosophical Magazine, 2003, 83[31], 3809-27