Develop a unified theory of electrically assisted deformation

Develop a theory that fully captures the concurrent thermal, electrical, magnetic, and mechanical contributions to electrically assisted deformation across different materials.

Background

The review explains that electrically assisted deformation may involve ordinary Joule heating, electromigration and current-assisted diffusion, electron–dislocation interactions, electropulsing-induced localisation, and magnetically induced dislocation unpinning. These effects are difficult to separate experimentally because current flow inevitably changes the specimen temperature and can also alter microstructure and magnetic state.

The authors note that existing explanations do not provide a generally applicable account of observations across material systems. Resolving this issue would enable researchers to distinguish genuine athermal electroplasticity from effects caused by thermal gradients, contact resistance, measurement lag, and other experimental artefacts.

References

Indeed, multiple concurrent phenomena (thermal, electrical, magnetic, and mechanical) are at play during electrically-assisted deformation, and their contributions can be difficult to decouple. No single theory yet fully captures all observations across different materials, so authors often cross-verify that any claimed electrically-assisted deformation is not an artefact of uneven heating, contact resistance, measurement lag, or other experimental biases.

— Direct current thermo-mechanical testing: Principles, uncertainty hierarchy, and its role in advanced materials characterisation  (2608.25525 - Koko et al., 26 Aug 2026) in Section 3.7.4, Electrically-assisted deformation