Related papers: Controlled polymorphic competition -- a path to to…
As an anode material for lithium-ion batteries, amorphous silicon offers a significantly higher energy density than the graphite anodes currently used. Alloying reactions of lithium and silicon, however, induce large deformation and lead to…
Targeting specific technological applications requires the control of nanoparticle properties, especially the crystalline polymorph. Freezing a nanodroplet deposited on a solid substrate leads to the formation of crystalline structures. We…
Atomistic simulations are used to test the equations of continuum contact mechanics in nanometer scale contacts. Nominally spherical tips, made by bending crystals or cutting crystalline or amorphous solids, are pressed into a flat, elastic…
Understanding failure in nanomaterials is critical for the design of reliable structural materials and small-scale devices that have components or microstructural elements at the nanometer length scale. No consensus exists on the effect of…
Molecular dynamics simulations are performed to provide a detailed understanding of the functional degradation of shape memory alloys at small scale. The origin of the experimentally reported accumulation of plastic deformation and the…
The mechanical properties and long-term structural reliability of crystalline materials are strongly influenced by microstructural features such as grain size, morphology, and crystallographic texture. These characteristics not only…
Ductility quantifies a material's capacity for plastic deformation, and it is a key property for preventing fracture driven failure in engineering parts. While some brittle materials exhibit improved ductility at small scales, the processes…
Fracture toughness $K_{IC}$ plays an important role in materials design. Along with numerous experimental methods to measure fracture toughness of materials, its understanding and theoretical prediction is very important. However,…
We discuss how simulations of mechanical properties of materials require descriptions at many different length scales --- from the nanoscale where an atomic description is appropriate, through a mesoscale where dislocation based…
The competition between deformation twinning and dislocation slip underpins the evolution of mesoscale plasticity in face-centered cubic materials. While competition between these mechanisms is known to be related to the critical features…
Progress in the emerging fields of atomic and close-to-atomic scale manufacturing is underpinned by enhanced precision and optimization of laser-controlled nanostructuring. Understanding thin films' crystallographic orientations and…
We examine the atomistic scale dependence of material's resistance-to-failure by numerical simulations and analytical analysis in electrical analogs of brittle crystals. We show that fracture toughness depends on the lattice geometry in a…
Amorphous silica ($a-SiO_2$) is a widely used inorganic material. Interestingly, the relationship between the local atomic structures of $a-SiO_2$ and their effects on ductility and fracture is seldom explored. Here, we combine large-scale…
Many stiff biological materials exhibiting outstanding compressive strength/weight ratio are characterized by high porosity, spanning different size-scales, typical examples being bone and wood. A successful bio-mimicking of these materials…
Properties of engineering materials are generally influenced by defects such as point defects (vacancies, interstitials, substitutional defects), line defects (dislocations), planar defects (grain boundaries, free surfaces/nanostructures,…
The detachment of material in an adhesive wear process is driven by a fracture mechanism which is controlled by a critical length-scale. Previous efforts in multi-asperity wear modeling have applied this microscopic process to rough elastic…
We report microscale friction experiments for diamond/metal and diamond/silica contacts under gigapascal contact pressures. Using a new nanoprobe technique which has sufficient dynamic range of force and stiffness, we demonstrate the…
We review the recent literature on the simulation of the structure and deformation of amorphous glasses, including oxide and metallic glasses. We consider simulations at different length and time scales. At the nanometer scale, we review…
The promise of enhanced performance has motivated the study of one dimensional nanomaterials, especially aligned carbon nanotubes (A-CNTs), for the reinforcement of polymeric materials. While early work has shown that CNTs have remarkable…
The ability to design synthesis processes that are out of equilibrium has opened the possibility of creating nanomaterials with remarkable physico-chemical properties, choosing from a much richer palette of possible atomic architectures…