Single crystal vs polycrystalline
The theory of slip in single crystals is well established. When an item is made from metal, however, a single crystal is not generally used. A piece of metal used to make a bicycle or a handrail is made of many small crystals or grains. This affects the behaviour of the metal in many ways:
- The grains are not aligned: for example, the [001] axis of one grain might be pointing in a different direction to the [001] axis of its neighbour. This means that different grains slip by different strains when a stress is applied to the whole material, and offer different amounts of resistance to the force. These all contribute to the way that the whole block deforms under stress.
- The grain boundaries formed where the grains meet have distinct properties from the rest of the material. When the two crystals either side of a grain boundary have different orientations, defects such as dislocations cannot pass simply through the boundary. Effects like these also have an affect on the response of a metal to stresses.
For these reasons, it is almost impossible to predict in detail from atomic scale theory how a block of metal will deform plastically when a suitable force is applied to it. We must instead find out what happens from experimental observations and then develop a macroscopic engineering model to describe and predict the behaviour of the polycrystalline sample.