Large-scale atomistic simulations of helium-3 bubble growth in complex palladium alloys.

Palladium is an attractive material for hydrogen and hydrogen-isotope storage applications due to its properties of large storage density and high diffusion of lattice hydrogen. When considering tritium storage, the material's structural and mechanical integrity is threatened by both the embrittlement effect of hydrogen and the creation and evolution of additional crystal defects (e.g., dislocations, stacking faults) caused by the formation and growth of helium-3 bubbles. Using recently developed inter-atomic potentials for the palladium-silver-hydrogen system, we perform large-scale atomistic simulations to examine the defect-mediated mechanisms that govern helium bubble growth. Our simulations show the evolution of a distribution of material defects, and we compare the material behavior displayed with expectations from experiment and theory. We also present density functional theory calculations to characterize ideal tensile and shear strengths for these materials, which enable the understanding of how and why our developed potentials either meet or confound these expectations.

Breaking Badly: DFT-D2 Gives Sizeable Errors for Tensile Strengths in Palladium-Hydride Solids.

Dispersion interactions play a crucial role in noncovalently bound molecular systems, and recent studies have shown that dispersion effects are also critical for accurately describing covalently bound solids. While most studies on bulk solids have solely focused on equilibrium properties (lattice constants, bulk moduli, and cohesive energies), there has been little work on assessing the importance of dispersion effects for solid-state properties far from equilibrium. In this work, we present a detailed analysis of both equilibrium and highly nonequilibrium properties (tensile strengths leading to fracture) of various palladium-hydride systems using representative DFT methods within the LDA, GGA, DFT-D2, DFT-D3, and nonlocal vdw-DFT families. Among the various DFT methods, we surprisingly find that the empirically constructed DFT-D2 functional gives extremely anomalous and qualitatively incorrect results for tensile strengths in palladium-hydride bulk solids. We present a detailed analysis of these effects and discuss the ramifications of using these methods for predicting solid-state properties far from equilibrium. Most importantly, we suggest caution in using DFT-D2 (or other coarse-grained parametrizations obtained from DFT-D2) for computing material properties under large stress/strain loads or for evaluating solid-state properties under extreme structural conditions.

The application of an atomistic J-integral to a ductile crack.

In this work we apply a Lagrangian kernel-based estimator of continuum fields to atomic data to estimate the J-integral for the emission dislocations from a crack tip. Face-centered cubic (fcc) gold and body-centered cubic (bcc) iron modeled with embedded atom method (EAM) potentials are used as example systems. The results of a single crack with a K-loading compare well to an analytical solution from anisotropic linear elastic fracture mechanics. We also discovered that in the post-emission of dislocations from the crack tip there is a loop size-dependent contribution to the J-integral. For a system with a finite width crack loaded in simple tension, the finite size effects for the systems that were feasible to compute prevented precise agreement with theory. However, our results indicate that there is a trend towards convergence.

Comparison of Molecular and Primitive Solvent Models for Electrical Double Layers in Nanochannels.

In a recent article (Lee et al. J. Comput. Theor. Chem., 2012, 8, 2012-2022.), it was shown that an electrolyte solution can be modeled in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations using a uniform dielectric constant in place of a polar solvent to validate Fluid Density Functional Theory (f-DFT) simulations. This technique can be viewed as a coarse-grained approximation of the polar solvent and reduces computational cost by an order of magnitude. However, the consequences of replacing the polar solvent with an effective permittivity are not well characterized, despite its common usage in f-DFT, Monte Carlo simulation, and Poisson-Boltzmann theory. In this paper, we have examined two solvent models of different fidelities with MD simulation of nanochannels. We find that the models produce qualitatively similar ion density profiles, but physical quantities such as electric field, electric potential, and capacitance differ by over an order of magnitude. In all cases, the bulk is explicitly modeled so that surface properties can be evaluated relative to a reference state. Moreover, quantities that define the reference state, such as bulk ion density, bulk solvent density, applied electric field, and temperature, are measurable, so cases with the same thermodynamic state can be compared. Insights into the solvent arrangement, most of which can not be determined from the coarse-grained model, are drawn from the model with an explicitly described polar solvent.

Molecular Dynamics Studies of Dislocations in CdTe Crystals from a New Bond Order Potential.

Cd(1-x)Zn(x)Te (CZT) crystals are the leading semiconductors for radiation detection, but their application is limited by the high cost of detector-grade materials. High crystal costs primarily result from property nonuniformity that causes low manufacturing yield. Although tremendous efforts have been made in the past to reduce Te inclusions/precipitates in CZT, this has not resulted in an anticipated improvement in material property uniformity. Moreover, it is recognized that in addition to Te particles, dislocation cells can also cause electric field perturbations and the associated property nonuniformities. Further improvement of the material, therefore, requires that dislocations in CZT crystals be understood and controlled. Here, we use a recently developed CZT bond order potential to perform representative molecular dynamics simulations to study configurations, energies, and mobilities of 29 different types of possible dislocations in CdTe (i.e., x = 1) crystals. An efficient method to derive activation free energies and activation volumes of thermally activated dislocation motion will be explored. Our focus gives insight into understanding important dislocations in the material and gives guidance toward experimental efforts for improving dislocation network structures in CZT crystals.

A Long-Range Electric Field Solver for Molecular Dynamics Based on Atomistic-to-Continuum Modeling.

Understanding charge transport processes at a molecular level is currently hindered by a lack of appropriate models for incorporating nonperiodic, anisotropic electric fields in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. In this work, we develop a model for including electric fields in MD using an atomistic-to-continuum framework. This framework provides the mathematical and the algorithmic infrastructure to couple finite element (FE) representations of continuous data with atomic data. Our model represents the electric potential on a FE mesh satisfying a Poisson equation with source terms determined by the distribution of the atomic charges. Boundary conditions can be imposed naturally using the FE description of the potential, which then propagate to each atom through modified forces. The method is verified using simulations where analytical solutions are known or comparisons can be made to existing techniques. In addition, a calculation of a salt water solution in a silicon nanochannel is performed to demonstrate the method in a target scientific application in which ions are attracted to charged surfaces in the presence of electric fields and interfering media.

Shape memory and pseudoelasticity in metal nanowires.

Structural reorientations in metallic fcc nanowires are controlled by a combination of size, thermal energy, and the type of defects formed during inelastic deformation. By utilizing atomistic simulations, we show that certain fcc nanowires can exhibit both shape memory and pseudoelastic behavior. We also show that the formation of defect-free twins, a process related to the material stacking fault energy, nanometer size scale, and surface stresses is the mechanism that controls the ability of fcc nanowires of different materials to show a reversible transition between two crystal orientations during loading and thus shape memory and pseudoelasticity.