Transmutation of spent nuclear fuels is globally being considered to reduce their radioactivity through capture and decay of minor actinides and fission products. Such reduction in radioactivity may enable their disposal in potential repositories for shorter durations. The target structural materials used in transmutation may undergo plastic deformation. A candidate target structural material, ...

Non-associative elasto-plasticity is the working model of plasticity for soil and rock mechanics. Yet, it is usually viewed as non-variational. In this work, we prove a contrario the existence of a variational evolution for such a model under a natural capping assumption on the hydrostatic stresses and a less natural mollification of the stress admissibility constraint. The obtained elasto-plas...

/department of mechanical engineering Introduction In plastic deformations, which arise due to the motion of dislocations in crystalline microstructure, size effects cannot be neglected at a small scales of observation. Within each grain of a polycrystal, the grain boundaries act as natural obstacles to dislocation motion. Due to the stresses dislocations exert onto each other, dislocations wil...

A method based on the kinetics of crystal growth has been developed and applied to the computation of three-dimensional microstrucuture in austenite-matensite steels. The detailed crystallography of the transformation is used to model a realistic martensitic microstrucuture during the transformation without an external system of stresses. The interaction energy based on the plastic work model i...

We consider fiber reinforced composites where both the matrix and the fibers are made of ideally plastic materials with the fibers being much stronger than the matrix. We restrict our attention to microstructures and applied stresses that lead to both microscopic and macroscopic antiplane shear deformations. We obtain a bound on the yield set of the composite in terms of the shapes of the fiber...

Precipitation, which usually occurs by nucleation, growth and coarsening, may be affected by elastic stresses which influence the thermodynan~ics of the system and thereby the driving force for precipitation. Such stresses may be internal, e.g. coherency stresses, or external, i.e. externally applied stresses. The consequences for nucleation, growth and coarsening are discussed in detail with s...