Plasticity of Crystals and Interfaces

Dear Colleagues,

Eight decades ago, brilliant insights of Orowan, Polanyi and Taylor brought about understanding of the basic plasticity mechanisms in crystals and ushered a new era of exploration of basic mechanical properties of polycrystalline materials. Much has been learned and many phenomena are either understood qualitatively or incorporated into predictive models. Nevertheless, some important questions still elude our efforts to fully comprehend plasticity of polycrystals and crystalline composites. The list of keywords given below provides brief summary of the open issues. The list is illustrative and the contributions are not limited to these topics.

The interactions of crystal dislocations with interfaces and with the interface dislocation structure have been investigated at length in past few decades, but the sheer complexity of the problem has, thus far, prevented a systematic description.  Moreover, these interactions are the key component of the observed size effects in plasticity. The problem is compounded by the variety of mechanisms for interface mobility at low and high temperatures. In a single crystal, the kinematics of glide at low temperatures is well understood, but the dislocation climb and its interaction with vacancy diffusion still lacks the full mathematical description.

The Special Issue on “Plasticity of Crystals and Interfaces” is intended as a forum to present the current state-of-the-art and recent advances, as well as to suggest the future directions. Experimental, computational and theoretical contributions are invited. Of particular interest are the contributions that provide understanding of micro-scale mechanisms and/or enable their description within meso-scale models.

Prof. Dr. Sinisa Dj. Mesarovic
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Crystals is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2100 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.