Related papers: Limits to crystallization pressure
Salt crystallization is a major cause of weathering of artworks, monuments and rocks. Damage will occur if crystals continue to grow in confinement, i.e. within the pore space of these materials generating mechanical stresses. We report on…
The forces exerted by growing crystals on the surrounding materials play a major role in many geological processes, from diagenetic replacement to rock weathering and uplifting of rocks and soils. Although crystallization is a…
The growth of crystals confined in porous or cellular materials is ubiquitous in Nature and industry. Confinement affects the formation of biominerals in living organisms, of minerals in the Earth's crust and of salt crystals damaging…
We present a continuum model describing dissolution and growth of a crystal contact confined against a substrate. Diffusion and hydrodynamics in the liquid film separating the crystal and the substrate are modeled within the lubrication…
The static friction between crystalline surfaces separated by a molecularly thin layer of adsorbed molecules is calculated using molecular dynamics simulations. These molecules naturally lead to a finite static friction that is consistent…
When materials freeze, they often undergo damage due to ice growth. Although this damage is commonly ascribed to the volumetric expansion of water upon freezing, it is usually driven by suction of water towards growing ice crystals. The…
Stressed dislocation pattern formation in crystal plasticity at finite deformation is demonstrated for the first time. Size effects are also demonstrated within the same mathematical model. The model involves two extra material parameters…
The mechanical properties of crystalline materials can be substantially modified under confinement. Such modified macroscopic properties are usually governed by the altered microstructures and internal stress fields. Here, we use a parallel…
Pressurized fluid injection into underground rocks occurs in applications like carbon sequestration, hydraulic fracturing, and wastewater disposal, and may lead to human-induced earthquakes and surface uplift. The fluid injection raises the…
Dating from experiments more than 20 years ago, it has been realized that the crystallization of hard colloidal particles in the vicinity of dynamical arrest has several anomalies, that render the conventional nucleation and growth model…
We focus our attention on Monte Carlo simulations of crystallization, which is one of the most important processes occurring in nature and technology of materials. Special attention is paid to the crystallization shrinkage and its…
We study a model of interacting particles in two dimensions to address the relation between crystal-crystal transformations and pressure-induced amorphization. On increasing pressure at very low temperature, our model undergoes a…
In supercooled liquids, vitrification generally suppresses crystallization. Yet some glasses can still crystallize despite the arrest of diffusive motion. This ill-understood process may limit the stability of glasses, but its microscopic…
Crystalline materials deform in an intermittent way via dislocation-slip avalanches. Below a critical stress, the dislocations are jammed within their glide plane due to long-range elastic interactions and the material exhibits plastic…
In the study of crystal nucleation via computer simulations, hard spheres are arguably the most extensively explored model system. Nonetheless, even in this simple model system, the complex thermodynamics of crystal nuclei can sometimes…
Life on Earth depends upon the dissolution of ionic salts in water, particularly NaCl. However, an atomistic scale understanding of the process remains elusive. Simulations lend themselves conveniently to studying dissolution since they…
A remarkable variety of organisms and wet materials are able to endure temperatures far below the freezing point of bulk water. Cryo-tolerance in biology is usually attributed to "anti-freeze" proteins, and yet massive supercooling ($<…
Most of crystalline materials exhibit a hysteresis on their deformation curve when mechanically loaded in alternating directions. This Bauschinger effect is the signature of mechanisms existing at the atomic scale and controlling the…
Extreme pressures and temperatures create conditions that allow even hard and brittle materials to deform plastically. Despite extensive research, the upper limits of flow strength, the resistance to plastic flow, remain uncertain, and the…
Combining three numerical methods (forward flux sampling, seeding of droplets, and finite size droplets), we probe the crystallization of hard spheres over the full range from close to coexistence to the spinodal regime. We show that all…