Predicting dislocation climb and creep from explicit atomistic details.

Here we report kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of dislocation climb in heavily deformed, body-centered cubic iron comprising a supersaturation of vacancies. This approach explicitly incorporates the effect of nonlinear vacancy-dislocation interaction on vacancy migration barriers as determined from atomistic calculations, and enables observations of diffusivity and climb over time scales and temperatures relevant to power-law creep. By capturing the underlying microscopic physics, the calculated stress exponents for steady-state creep rates agree quantitatively with the experimentally measured range, and qualitatively with the stress dependence of creep activation energies.

Atomistic simulation of creep in a nanocrystal.

We describe a method to simulate on macroscopic time scales the stress relaxation in an atomistic nanocrystal model under an imposed strain. Using a metadynamics algorithm for transition state pathway sampling we follow the full evolution of a classical anelastic relaxation event, with relaxation times governed by the nanoscale microstructure imperfections in the solid. We show that probing this sensitive variation leads to mechanistic insights that reveal a direct correlation between system-level relaxation behavior and localized atomic displacements in the vicinity of the nanostructured defects, in turn implying a unit mechanism for self-organized plastic response. This suggests a new class of measurements in which the microstructure imperfections are characterized and matched to predictive simulations enabled by the present method.

Hydrogen-vacancy interactions in Fe-C alloys.

Energetics and concentrations of hydrogen-containing point defect clusters (PDCs) in Fe-C alloys are calculated and cast into a PDC dominance diagram. Because of the strong binding effects of iron vacancies on the stability of the clusters, hydrogen accumulation requires the total hydrogen and vacancy concentrations to be comparable. As a result of the interplay between repulsive and attractive binding processes, PDC populations in Fe-C-H effectively decouple into the binary systems Fe-C and Fe-H. This results in significant vacancy-hydrogen PDC populations even for low total hydrogen concentrations.

Many-body potential for point defect clusters in Fe-C alloys.

Modeling the consequences of crystalline defects requires efficient interaction sampling. Empirical potentials can identify relevant pathways if the energetics and configurations of competing defects are captured. Here, we develop such a potential for an alloy of arbitrary point defect concentration, body-centered cubic alpha-Fe supersaturated in C. This potential successfully calculates energetically favored defects, and predicts formation energies and configurations of multicarbon-multivacancy clusters that were not attainable with existing potentials or identified previously via ab initio methods.