Micromechanical Studies of Strain Rate Dependent Compressive Strength in Brittle Polycrystalline Materials

We propose a novel computational model for the high fidelity prediction of failure mechanisms in brittle polycrystalline materials. A three-dimensional finite element model of the polycrystalline structure is reconstructed to explicitly account for the micro-features such as grain sizes, grain orientations, and grain boundary misorientations. Grain boundaries are explicitly represented by a thin layer of elements with non-zero misorientation...