Simulating materials failure by using up to one billion atoms and the world's fastest computer: Brittle fracture.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 16578876.
- Also identified by PMC identifier 122852.
- No licence information is recorded for this record.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
We describe the first of two large-scale atomic simulation projects on materials failure performed on the 12-teraflop ASCI (Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative) White computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This is a multimillion-atom simulation study of crack propagation in rapid brittle fracture where the cracks travel faster than the speed of sound. Our finding centers on a bilayer solid that behaves under large strain like an interface crack between a soft (linear) material and a stiff (nonlinear) material. We verify that the crack behavior is dominated by the local (nonlinear) wave speeds, which can be in excess of the conventional sound speeds of a solid.