Effects of surface roughness on plastic strain localization in polycrystalline aggregates

The surface state of mechanical components differs according to applied loadings. Industrial processes may produce specific features at the surface, such as roughness, local hardening, residual stresses or recrystallization. Under fatigue loading, all these parameters will affect the component lifetime, but in different manner. A better understanding of each surface state parameter, separately first and then all combined, will provide a better prediction of fatigue life. The study focuses on the effect of surface roughness. Crystal plasticity finite element computations have been carried out on three-dimensional polycrystalline aggregates with different roughness levels. Local mechanical fields have been analyzed both at the surface and inside the bulk to highlight the competition between crystallography and roughness to impose localization patterns. As soon as surface roughness is strong enough, classical localization bands driven by grains orientation are replaced by localizations patterns driven by the local roughness topology. Nevertheless, this effect tends to decrease gradually under the surface, and it becomes usually negligible after the first layer of grains. The discussion allows us to characterize the influence of the surface state on the local mechanical fields.