A crystal plasticity model for hexagonal close packed (HCP) crystals including twinning and de-twinning mechanisms

• A twinning and de-twinning model (TDT) is proposed to describe crystal plasticity.
• Four mechanisms include nucleation, growth, shrinkage and re-twinning of twins.
• Growth and shrinkage of twins are related with both matrix and twin domains.
• TDT model can capture the key phenomena observed in experiments.

Together with slip, deformation twinning and de-twinning are the plastic deformation mechanisms in hexagonal close packed (HCP) crystals, which strongly affect texture evolution and anisotropic response. As a consequence, several twinning models have been proposed and implemented in the existing polycrystalline plasticity models. De-twinning is an inverse process with respect to twinning, which is relevant to cycling, fatigue and complex loads but is rarely incorporated into polycrystalline plastic models. In this paper, we propose a physics-based twinning and de-twinning (TDT) model that has the capability of dealing with both mechanisms during plastic deformation. The TDT model is characterized by four deformation mechanisms corresponding to twin nucleation, twin growth, twin shrinkage and re-twinning. Twin nucleation and twin growth are associated with deformation twinning, and twin shrinkage and re-twinning are associated with de-twinning. The proposed TDT model is implemented in the Elasto-Visco-Plastic Self-Consistent (EVPSC) model. We demonstrate the validity and the capability of the TDT model by simulating cyclic loading of magnesium alloys AZ31B plate and AZ31 bar. Comparison with the measurements indicates that the TDT model is able to capture the key features observed in experiments, implying that the mechanical response in the simulated materials is mainly associated with twinning and de-twinning.