Group member SeonHong Na received travel scholarship to attend USNCCM Montreal

Abstract:​

A combined phase field and crystal plasticity approach for capturing thermo-mechanical behavior of polycrystalline rock salt
 
SeonHong Na, WaiChing Sun
Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, Columbia University, New York
 
Rock salt or halite is one of the major materials used for nuclear waste disposal. The desired characteristics of rock salt, i.e. the high thermal conductivity, low permeability and self-healing are highly related to the crystalline microstructure. Conventionally, this microstructural effect is often incorporated phenomenologically in macroscopic models. Nevertheless, effort to directly simulate the interplays among micro-mechanical mechanisms, such as micro-cracking, inelastic dilatancy, grain boundary sliding and dislocation creeping, which may bring more reliable and robust forward predictions for the long-term thermo-mechanical behavior of salt, are lacking. The goal of this research is to fulfill this knowledge gap. In particular, we first formulate a computational framework that may predict multi-slip system crystal plasticity of single crystal in rate-independent and rate-dependent regimes. Using this as a starting point, we introduce an anisotropic phase-field based model in which displacement and temperature jumps are regularized to model the grain boundary where the temperature-dependent plastic flow is parallel to the ground boundaries. The texture of the polycrystalline salt is assumed to be random by assigning different sets of orientations to each grain. The grain boundary is approximated using the crystal plasticity constitutive model with single slip system to include the inelastic behavior, while the fracture response is captured via the evolving phase field. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed model is able to capture the brittle-ductile transition under various of loading rate, temperature and confining pressure with a minimal set of material parameters.
 
Keywords: salt, halite, crystal plasticity, slip system, thermo-mechanical analysis, constitutive model