4. Conclusions

The preceding analysis and illustrations have shown that any approach aimed at assessing and predicting the behavior of a polycrystalline material must necessarily be based on simultaneous modeling of the physical mechanisms of inelastic deformation and consideration of the microstructure of the representative volume element using an appropriate statistical approach. In some cases, the assumption of scale separability implicit in the approach presented is not valid, and more complex and necessarily more cumbersome approaches are required.

Despite their technological and scientific interest, certain classical plasticity phenomena have been ignored in the previous model, notably localized shear-band deformation and associated softening phenomena. For other classes of materials and/or behaviors, the previous approach needs to be extended and/or improved, in particular...