Analysis of dislocation microstructures: Impact of force truncation and slip systems

Abstract

We present a systematic investigation of the microstructures resulting from simulations of overdamped dislocation dynamics and quantitatively assess the impact of various slip system constraints and force truncation schemes. We show that the degree of local ordering in these structures correlates with the number of active slip planes. We compare the microstructures resulting from a common force cut-off scheme with those generated by applying full periodic boundary conditions and find that the dislocation structure is quite sensitive to the choice of boundary conditions.