Response to “Shear Impossibility—Comments on ‘Void Growth by Dislocation Emission’ and ‘Void Growth in Metals’”

We thank the authors of Ref. [1] for their comments and interest in our work [2–6]. We agree that the emission of shear loops on one single shear plane cannot lead to void growth. However, our simulations suggest that coordinated shear on non-parallel planes can lead to void growth/shrinkage [3–5]. Detailed descriptions of this process are still being worked out and represent an exciting area for future research. Thus, there seem to be two separate dislocation mechanisms operating either sequentially or simultaneously: shear and prismatic loop emission. Whereas prismatic loops are well known and have been extensively documented, the postulation of “special” shear loops is novel. The authors [1] have correctly pointed out that special restrictions need to be applied to these shear loops, something not mentioned in Refs. [2–6]. On the subject of shear impossibility, the authors [1] bring some good points in their comments of our papers. Indeed, the closed loop emitted from the surface of the void does not by itself expand the void. This is obvious from our papers, in which we considered a growth of a cylindrical void by emission of an edge dislocation [2], and a collapse of the void by an emission of an opposite-signed edge dislocation [5]. Thus, if both (positive and negative) dislocations were emitted (which is a 2-D counterpart of a dislocation loop), no net effect on the void growth would take place. Void growth takes place by the outward transfer of the material, which is possible even in an incompressible case due to the outward movement of the remote boundary of the body (the plastically deformed region around the void is surrounded by an elastically deformed region). Eq. (1) of the Comments on our papers [1] nicely states that the net amount of added material associated with the crea-