Statistical aspects of low temperature discontinuous deformation

Further investigations of discontinuous deformation processes of different types and, particularly, their statistics are of great interest for understanding common features of the phenomenon of plastic instability which do not depend on the microscopic mechanism. The authors report data on the low temperature deformation of a commercial Cu-Be2 alloy. Unlike alloys manifesting the Portevin-Le Chatelier (PLC) effect, unstable plastic flow is supposed to be governed by thermomechanical instability (TMI). The essence of the effect is occurrence of an avalanche-like deformation process when dislocation mobility increases due to heat generation by the mobile dislocations