Wavelet-enriched adaptive crystal plasticity finite element model for polycrystalline microstructures

Micromechanical analysis of polycrystalline microstructures of metals and alloys, using crystal plasticity finite element (CPFE) models is extensively used for predicting deformation and failure under various conditions of strain-rates, creep and fatigue loading. Many CPFE models involve a large number of degrees of freedom for accurate representation of realistic polycrystalline microstructures. This can lead to prohibitively high computational costs to conduct meaningful analyses of phenomena of interest. To overcome this limitation, the authors have recently developed a wavelet enrichment adapted finite element model in Azdoud and Ghosh (2017) for elastic materials. The method adaptively creates an optimal discretization space conforming to the solution profile by projecting the solution field onto a set of scaling and multi-resolution wavelet basis functions. This paper extends this wavelet adapted FE model to finite deformation, crystal plasticity analysis of polycrystalline microstructures. After presenting the formulations, various validation tests are conducted to examine the convergence rates and computational efficiency of this method.