Dislocations are the primary carrier of plastic deformation of crystalline materials. A clear understanding of dislocation motion and interactions at small scale is very critical in understanding how the microstructure affects the macroscale mechanical properties of materials. The objective is to develop a method to directly simulate the collective behavior of many dislocations inside materials and predict the macroscale behavior of materials. The method is able to determine the strength of materials based on the microstructure, which is useful in the design and evaluation of next generation engineering materials.
To overcome the barrier from high computation requirements in such simulations, parallel computing techniques are utilized into the dislocation dynamics (DD) model. A comprehensive parallel DD code, UCLA-Microplasticity, is successfully developed in our group.