Part I – January 1969 - Papers - An Energy Expression for the Equilibrium Form of a Dislocation in the Line Tension Approximation

An approximate expression is obtained for the energy of a closed dislocation loop in equi1ibriu)n with a constant net stress. The result obtained is valid for loops in isotropic or anisotropzc materials provided that they are suJficiently large that the energy per unit length of a segment of the loop can be approximated by that of an infinite straight dislocation tangent to the loop. It is shown that this approximation leads to very close agreement with a more rigorous calculation of the elastic energy of a circular glide loop. The Gibbs-Wulff Form, GWF, of a dislocation is the closed planar loop which has the smallest elastic self-energy of all possible loops having the same Burgers vector and enclosing a fixed area, A.' The energy of such a loop is related to the net resolved shear stress* required to expand the loop and to the stress required to activate a Frank-Read source.223 In the following sectiorls the problem of determining the form of the GWF is discussed and an approximate method for calculating its elastic self-energy is presented. It is demonstrated that the approximations employed lead to no serious errors when applied to a calculation of the elastic energy of a circular glide loop. This method is then used to obtain a closed form expression for the energy of GWFs in isotropic and anisotropic materials. THEORY Burton, Frank, and cabrera4 have proved that the relationship of the equilibrium shape of a two-dimensional array of atoms under the influence of the Gibbs free energy associated with unit length of its boundary, G(O), is that the polar plot of G(0) vs 0 is proportional to the pedal of the GWF.* The angle 0 is measured "The pedal of the polar graph ofG(0) vs0 is the envelope of tangents to the eraph.relative to some crystallographic reference direction. The difficulty in applying this result to a closed dislocation loop arises from the self-interaction of the loop. For a dislocation the energy analogous to G(0) is a function of the total configurati~n.~ Consequently the relation which determines the GWF is an integro-differential equation rather than the simple differen- tial equation which results when G(8) is a function of 0 alone. Mitchell and smialek3 and Brown~ have used the self-stress concept introduced by ~rown' to calculate the shapes of dislocations in equilibrium with an applied stress. In this approach the glide force on an element of the dislocation loop due to the interaction of the element with the rest of the loop is equated to the glide force exerted by the local applied stress. The shape of the loop is then adjusted so that the two forces above are equal at all points on the loop. It is possible to calculate the energies of such loops by noting that, for equilibrium with an applied stress, the energy is equal to pijbiAj (summation convention) where bi is the Burgers vector, p.. is the local net stress tensor, and Ai is a vector directed perpendicular to the plane of thd loop with magnitude equal to the area of the loop. Also Brown' has calculated the energy of a hypothetical polygonal GWF using the above technique and anisotropic elasticity. However, his indicated solution for the energy in the general case of an arbitrary GWF is only slightly less involved than an iterative solution of the integrodifferential equation referred to earlier. In the present work the approximation employed by DeWit and Koehler' is used to calculate the energy of a closed loop in equilibrium with an applied stress. That is, the energy of a loop segment, ds, is approximated by the product of ds and the energy per unit length of an infinite, straight dislocation in a cylinder coaxial with the tangent to the loop at the angular position of the segment. This is known as the "line tension" approximation. The inner cutoff radius of the elastic solution defines the core radius, while the outer cutoff radius is determined by some characteristic dimension of the loop. Actually, both of these radii vary with the edge-screw character of the segment. The effective core radius changes because of the orientation dependence of the Peierls width of a dislocation,8 and the outer radius should be the radial distance from the circumference of the loop to the center of symmetry of the area enclosed by the loop.g However, since the energy varies logarithmically with the ratio of these radii while depending directly on the effective elastic constants, only the effect of the latter is considered. This approximation also neglects the self-interaction of the loop segments. For small loops this will doubtless be extremely important, but for large glide loops produced by plastic deformation the self-interaction is not nearly so important in determining the energy of the loop. This point is illustrated by the following calculation of the energy of a circular loop. Consider a circular loop of radius R which lies in the XI - x, plane of an infinite isotropic continuum and whose Burgers vector makes an angle $ with xs. The first-order solution for the elastic self-energy is:'