Preface of the guest editors

摘要

The present issue is devoted to the broad field of muliscale simulations for solid materials. In the era of “materials by design”, the “materials genome initiative” and “virtual testing”, scale-bridging techniques are required more than ever to overcome the limitations of phenomenological material models. The exploration of the design space for novel materials as well as a detailed understanding of deformation and failure mechanisms of traditional materials call for predictive models. Unlike empirical constitutive laws, full-physics models aim to provide predictive capabilities that apply beyond the specific experimental conditions whose data were used to fit material parameters. New or interesting phenomena make us probe the mechanics and physics of solids outside the regimes of classical constitutive theories such as elasticity or viscoplasticity. Examples include the mechanics at the nanoscale, in particular in the presence of free surfaces, or non-Schmid-type plasticity, or damage and time-dependent behavior in complex heterogeneous solids, or coupled multiphysics problems, or engineered materials systems, to name but a few. Here, multiscale strategies become essential. Whether they are hierarchical (such as homogenization approaches or parameter passing) or use concurrent-scale coupling (such as the quasicontinuum method), all such techniques pass information across scales and combine techniques from different length and time scales