Metals are commonly used in engineering applications and can undergo irreversible plastic deformation upon loading. When the size of the modeled part is large, isotropic material properties are typically assumed, and continuum plasticity models like bilinear isotropic hardening are used. However, the evolution of precise manufacturing processes has allowed control and physical testing of full or subsections of the products via real-time sensors or equipment at millimeters or even microns length scales. Therefore, the study of micromechanical response is gaining steady but concrete momentum. At small length scales, the underlying microstructure becomes important, the local material response is no longer isotropic, and more complex plasticity models such as crystal plasticity should be used to capture the important effects of the microstructure on the mechanical responses. This course will cover the fundamentals of microstructures and crystal plasticity theory. It also provides instructions on how to perform microstructure meshing, material assignments, and to run a crystal plasticity analysis in Ansys Mechanical and PyMAPDL.
