Atomic-scale modeling of the deformation of nanocrystalline metals

摘要

Nanocrystalline metals, i.e. metals with grain sizes from 5 to 50 nm, display technologically interesting properties, such as dramatically increased hardness, increasing with decreasing grain size. Dur to the small grain size, direct atomci-scale simulations of plastic deformation of these materials are possible, as such a polycrystalline system can be modeled with the computational resources available today.