Propagation of a Front by Kink Motion

Abstract

There are numerous problems in which an interface propagates through a body as it is loaded, where, when a material particle crosses this moving interface, it transforms from a metastable state to a more stable state. Examples of this include twin boundary and phase boundary motion in solids. Typically, such an interface propagates in a direction normal to itself at a speed, which in continuum theory, is determined by a kinetic law. The kinetic law is viewed as providing a continuum-scale description of the micromechanical processes underlying the front motion. In this paper we use a simple mechanical analog to illustrate how the kinetic law can be calculated by modeling the microscale mechanisms.