Part IX - Discussion - A Comment on the Dorn-Rainak Analysis of Peierls' Deformation

The strong temperature dependence of the flow stress of bcc metals has prompted considerable interest and controversy concerning the rate-controlling influence of the Peierls' mechanism upon deformation in metals.18"21 Dorn and Rajnak" recently offered a criterion for Peierls' deformation utilizing a line-energy model of a dislocation to estimate the saddle-point activation energy, for the nucleation of a pair of kinks as a function of applied stress and the height and shape of the peierls9- barrier. It was found that Un/2Uk, where 2Uk is the excess energy of a kink pair, was a unique function of where is the effective stress and 7p is the Peierls' stress as defined in Fig. 20. The relationship found by Dorn and Rajnak between is given by the solid line of Fig. 21. may be expressed in terms of the temperature of test, T, and the athermal temperature, T,, defined in Fig. 20. Considering the strain-rate, 9, of deformation for a thermally activated process to be given by where fo is nearly a constant, it is seen that and the theoretical relationship of Fig. 21 may be examined with readily obtainable experimental parameters. Dorn and Coworkers analyzed a large amount of experimental data in this manner for materials sus-