Abstract
The size effect of metallic materials is one of the important factors for understanding characteristics of material. The higher-order gradient crystal plasticity model was proposed for describing the size effect. In this model, an additional governing equation expressing the dislocation density filed is introduced, and both the displacement and dislocation density fields must be solved simultaneously. It is known that in the higher-order gradient crystal plasticity analysis, the finite element method may sometimes yield inappropriate solutions. Therefore, the reproducing kernel particle method (RKPM), a type of meshfree method, is introduced to solve the higher-order gradient crystal plasticity model. To improve the accuracy and stability of the analysis, the stabilized conforming nodal integration (SCNI) was used as the numerical integration scheme. RKPM using the SCNI was found to improve the analysis accuracy and stability. However, the Voronoi domain used in the SCNI for three-dimensional analysis is known to be computationally expensive and a more suitable method should be adopted for improving the computational efficiency. In this study, the higher-order gradient crystal plasticity model is analyzed using the RKPM, and the stabilized non-conforming nodal integration (SNNI), which uses a simplified integration domain instead of the Voronoi domain, is introduced to reduce the computational cost. The accuracy of the SNNI in two-dimensional and three-dimensional analyses is investigated and the numerical efficiency is discussed.
