Patrick Heighway

Abstract:

When a metallic specimen is plastically deformed, its underlying crystal structure must often rotate in order to comply with its macroscopic boundary conditions. There is growing interest within the dynamic compression community in exploiting x-ray diffraction measurements of lattice rotation to infer which combinations of plasticity mechanisms are operative in uniaxially shock- or ramp-compressed crystals, thus informing materials science at the greatest extremes of pressure and strain rate. However, it is not widely appreciated that several of the existing models linking rotation to slip activity are fundamentally inapplicable to a planar compression scenario. We present molecular dynamics simulations of single crystals suffering true uniaxial strain, and show that the Schmid and Taylor analyses used in traditional materials science fail to predict the ensuing lattice rotation. We propose a simple alternative framework based on the elastoplastic decomposition that successfully recovers the observed rotation for these single crystals, and can further be used to identify the operative slip systems and the amount of activity upon them in the idealized cases of single and double slip.

Abstract:

We present molecular dynamics simulations of shock and release in micron-scale tantalum crystals that exhibit postbreakout temperatures far exceeding those expected under the standard assumption of isentropic release. We show via an energy-budget analysis that this is due to plastic-work heating from material strength that largely counters thermoelastic cooling. The simulations are corroborated by experiments where the release temperatures of laser-shocked tantalum foils are deduced from their thermal strains via in situ x-ray diffraction and are found to be close to those behind the shock.

Abstract:

In dynamic-compression experiments, the line-imaging Velocity Interferometer System for Any Reflector (VISAR) is a well-established diagnostic used to probe the velocity history, including wave profiles derived from dynamically compressed interfaces and wavefronts, depending on material optical properties. Knowledge of the velocity history allows for the determination of the pressure achieved during compression. Such a VISAR analysis is often based on Fourier transform techniques and assumes that the recorded interferograms are free from image distortions. In this paper, we describe the VISAR diagnostic installed at the HED-HIBEF instrument located at the European XFEL along with its calibration and characterization. It comprises a two-color (532, 1064 nm), three-arm (with three velocity sensitivities) line imaging system. We provide a procedure to correct VISAR images for geometric distortions and evaluate the performance of the system using Fourier analysis. We finally discuss the spatial and temporal calibrations of the diagnostic. As an example, we compare the pressure extracted from the VISAR analysis of shock-compressed polyimide and silicon.