Strongly non-local modelling of dislocation transport and pile-up

The purpose of this work is the continuum modelling of transport and pile-up of infinite discrete dislocation walls driven by non-local interaction and external loading. To this end, the underlying model for dislocation wall interaction is based on the non-singular Peierls–Nabarro (PN) model for the dislocation stress field. For simplicity, attention is restricted to walls consisting of single-sign dislocations and to continuous wall distributions on a single glide plane. In this context, the influence of strongly non-local (SNL; long-range) interaction, and its approximation as weakly non-local (WNL; short-range) are studied in the context of interaction- and external-load-driven wall pile-up at a boundary. The pile-up boundary is modelled via a spatially dependent dislocation mobility which decreases to zero at the boundary. The pile-up behaviour predicted by the current SNL-based continuous wall distribution modelling is consistent with that predicted by discrete wall distribution modelling. Both deviate substantially from the pile-up behaviour predicted by WNL-based continuous wall distribution modelling. As such, it is clearly essential to account in continuum models for the intrinsic SNL character of the interaction between same-sign dislocations ‘close’ to the boundary. Gradient-based WNL ‘approximation’ of this interaction is not justified.