Achievement

Understanding and controlling the fracture of low weight, high strength metals, such as aluminum, is crucial to the development of more energy efficient structures. IGERT Fellow Richard Zamora and coworkers performed the first direct ab initio multiscale simulations of metallic fracture in the presence of environmental impurities. Hydrogen and oxygen surface impurities were found to inhibit the onset of plasticity at an aluminum crack tip, leading to a more brittle failure response. Zamora developed a quantum mechanically informed continuum model to duplicate the general embrittlement trends found in direct simulation and used this model to test the effects of common environmental impurities. His results suggest that plastic inhibition is common among electronegative impurities. This work brings researchers closer to understanding the important chemo-mechanical mechanisms of metallic fracture in realistic environments.