A Continuous Approach to the Description of Strain Hardening of Metals within the Gauge Theory of Translational Defects

摘要

The paper proposes a new approach to the description of strain hardening based on the gauge theory of defects. There are several theories of strain hardening in which hardening is associated with an increase in the scalar density of dislocations. The existing theories differ in that they use different interaction mechanisms responsible for hardening. Despite the difference in hardening mechanisms, all the existing theories lead to the same relationship, which is known in the literature as the hardening law. Our approach employs the tensor density of defects, in contrast to the scalar density in the existing hardening theories. The relationship between the tensor and scalar defect densities is established from the energy relations, leading to a hardening law that coincides with the existing expressions.