Extending intergranular normal-stress distributions using symmetries of isotropic linear-elastic polycrystalline materials

Intergranular normal stresses (INS) are critical in the initiation and evolution of grain boundary damage in polycrystalline materials. To model the effects of such microstructural damage on a macroscopic scale, knowledge of INS is usually required statistically at each representative volume element subjected to various loading conditions. However, calculating INS distributions for different stress states can be time-consuming. This study proposes a new method to extend existing INS distributions to arbitrary loading conditions using the symmetries of isotropic linear-elastic polycrystalline materials. The method relies on a fact that INS distributions can be accurately reproduced from the first (typically) ten statistical moments, which depend trivially on just two deviatoric-stress invariants and a few material invariants due to assumed isotropy and linearity of the polycrystalline model. While these material invariants are complex averages, they can be extracted numerically from a few existing INS distributions and tabulated for later use. Practically, only two such INS distributions at properly selected loadings are required to provide all relevant material invariants for the first 11 statistical moments, which can then be used to reconstruct the INS distribution for arbitrary loading conditions. The proposed approach is demonstrated to be accurate and feasible for an arbitrarily selected linear-elastic material under various loading conditions.