Atomistic-continuum hybrid analysis of dislocation behavior in spinodally decomposed Fe-Cr alloys

In this study, we first present the molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of dislocation behavior in a spinodally decomposed Fe-Cr alloy. The MD simulation is used for exploring the nature of the interaction between a dislocation and the spinodal decomposition without any specific assumptions. In order to classify the interaction mechanism, dislocation dynamics (DD) simulations of the interaction between a dislocation and the spinodal decomposition are performed. In the simulations, we controlled the interaction mechanism by adding and removing the atomistic mechanism. The simulation results clearly illustrate that the atomistic mechanism can be negligible in determining the critical resolved shear stress (CRSS) of spinodally decomposed Fe-Cr alloys, and the internal stress generated by the lattice constant mismatch is a dominant mechanism. These findings are very useful for simplifying the analysis of the mechanism of material strength change due to the spinodal decomposition. Particularly in the analysis using the DD simulations, the required computational effort for simulating the dislocation behavior is greatly reduced by taking into account only the internal stress without the atomistic dislocation core influence.