https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2014-02269-8
Review
Crackling noise in plasticity
1 COMP Centre of Excellence, Department of Applied Physics, Aalto University, PO Box 11100, 00076 Aalto, Espoo, Finland
2 CNR – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, IENI, via R. Cozzi 53, 20125 Milano, Italy
3 ISI Foundation, via Alassio 11/c, 10126 Torino, Italy
a e-mail: stefano.zapperi@cnr.it
Received: 6 May 2014
Revised: 18 August 2014
Published online: 24 October 2014
Plastic deformation is a paradigmatic problem of multiscale materials modelling with relevant processes ranging from the atomistic scale up to macroscopic scales where deformation is treated by continuum mechanics. Recent experiments, investigating deformation fluctuations under conditions where plastic deformation was expected to occur in a smooth and stable manner, demonstrate that deformation is spatially heterogeneous and temporally intermittent, not only on atomic scales, where spatial heterogeneity is expected, but also on mesoscopic scales where plastic fluctuations involve collective events of widely different amplitudes. Evidence for crackling noise in plastic deformation comes from acoustic emission measurements and from deformation of micron-scale samples both in crystalline and amorphous materials. Here we provide a detailed account of our current understanding of crackling noise in crystal and amorphous plasticity stemming from experiments, computational models and scaling theories. We focus our attention on the scaling properties of plastic strain bursts and their interpretation in terms of non-equilibrium critical phenomena.
© EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag, 2014
