The mechanisms of plastic strain observed at high degrees of alternating bending of thin aluminum foils glued to elastically strained substrates have been investigated. As extrusion and intrusion develop on the surface of the aluminum foils, multiscale fragmentation of the structure is found to take place in the bulk of the materials to form nanostructured phase boundaries between subgrains. The width of the phase boundaries varies between 200 and 300 nm, with the size of the structure elements within the subgrain boundaries being 30 -50 nm. Formation of the nanostructured phase boundaries between nonequilibrium subgrains is regarded to be the fragmentation mechanism operative at the submicrometer scale level in the foils subjected to bending-torsion at very high degrees of plastic strain.

We investigate some mechanisms of the response, including fracture, of block geomedia to nonequiaxial compression in shear by the movable cellular automaton method. For a characteristic of the degree of nonequiaxiality it is proposed to use a dimensionless parameter which, according to calculations, is efficiently applicable to determine the deformation mode of a medium under constrained shear conditions. It is shown that increasing the compressive stress in the shear direction shortens the stage of quasiplastic deformation of a geomedium and decreases its shear strength. This is because mesoscale mechanisms of interblock discontinuity assume a leading part in the deformation and fracture of the geomedium with increasing the degree of constraint. The effect shows up, among other things, as an increase in effective dilatation rate of the shear zone due to the change of lower-scale deformation mechanisms for mechanisms of higher structural levels.