Autowave Plasticity of Hydrogen-Charged Alloys

Abstract This paper proposes an autowave description of localized plastic flow in solids for hydrogen-charged metals. Experiments showed that plastic flow is always localized on the macroscopic scale and the localization occurs through various autowave processes. The autowave theory of localized plastic flow was applied to analyze hydrogen effect on plasticity. The quantitative behavior of macroscopic plastic flow localization was compared between ferritic and austenitic steels, aluminum and titanium alloys. The comparisons were made for different strain hardening stages before and after cathodic hydrogen charging. The main characteristics of plastic flow localization in these conditions were determined by double-exposure speckle photography combined with tensile tests. It was found that hydrogen charging leads to a rougher pattern of localized plastic flow. The role of hydrogen contributions to plasticity due to bulk diffusion and dislocation transport was estimated.