Peach-Koehler theory was used to simulate the motion of arbitrarily configured interacting dislocations which were located on arbitrary glide planes and had any permitted Burgers vector. Self-interaction was regularized by using a modified Brown procedure which remained stable and lost accuracy in a well-controlled manner as atomic dimensions were approached. The method was illustrated by applying it to several examples of single and interacting dislocations in a face-centered cubic slip system. The critical strain for the propagation of a dislocation in a capped layer was calculated, and was found to be in excellent agreement with theory. Dislocations in a layer with a free surface were studied in order to test simplified methods for modelling dislocation-surface interaction. Frank-Read sources were simulated in an infinite medium and in a strained layer. The latter were seen to give rise to the characteristic pile-up structures which were often observed experimentally. The interaction between two initially straight dislocations on intersecting glide planes was studied as a function of the relative angle and initial separation. It was found that an attractive instability occurred for a well-defined range of relative angles, and that this range depended only weakly upon the initial separation. This seemed to suggest that the detailed calculation of such interactions could be replaced by a simple set of interaction rules which specified their outcome. However, various factors were identified which limited the usefulness of such rules. It was further determined that, when an attractive instability occurred, the configuration which was adopted by the dislocations as they neared each other bore little resemblance to any simple starting configuration. This suggested that calculations of the type presented here could provide a useful starting point for atomistic calculations of interacting dislocations.

Simulation of Dislocations on the Mesoscopic Scale - I. Methods and Examples. K.W.Schwarz: Journal of Applied Physics, 1999, 85[1], 108-19