The formation of misoriented dislocation cells in the course of plastic deformation was explained within the framework of continuum mechanics as a result of the trend to reduce the energetically costly hardening in multi-slip by locally decreasing the number of active slip systems by local lattice rotations. A model of an infinite crystal deformed in plane strain by symmetric double slip, where the plastic strain was carried by straight, parallel, edge dislocations, was considered. The non-local constitutive equations of the model were derived from statistical mechanics description of the collective behavior of dislocations. The finite cell size as well as the orientation of the cell boundaries resulted from the competition between 2 tendencies: the internal and dissipative energy tend to decrease the cell size, whereas the short-range dislocation interactions opposed this tendency.

Statistically Based Continuum Model of Misoriented Dislocation Cell Structure Formation. J.Kratochvíl, M.Kružík, R.Sedláček: Physical Review B, 2007, 75[6], 064104 (14pp)