What is it about?
Brittle metals and alloys are known to fracture at low temperatures but also to undergo plastic deformation. Conventional models only say that either fracture or plastic deformation occurs and do not consider the actual phenomenon of both events occurring simultaneously. Our new atomistic study shows that fracture dynamically causes plastic deformation and provides an answer to this long-standing problem.
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Photo by Mahdis Mousavi on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Metals and alloys are widely used as structural materials in various types of infrastructure such as buildings, ships, bridges and nuclear power plants. To avoid unexpected catastrophic events, it is crucial to understand exactly how they fracture. In the new modeling study, the state-of-the-art interatomic potential designed using machine learning techniques successfully revealed the complexity of metallic fracture.
Perspectives
I am very pleased that this paper has been selected as an Editor's pick of Journal of Applied Physics and as an article for the AIP Publishing Showcase. Although this article is theoretical and fundamental, I hope that the results given here will lead to practical applications in the future. This is likely to be the last research paper in my career at Japan Atomic Energy Agency. I would like to express my special thanks to everybody who worked with me, especially to the co-authors for their generous support.
Tomoaki Suzudo
Japan Atomic Energy Agency
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Emergence of crack tip plasticity in semi-brittle α-Fe, Journal of Applied Physics, February 2024, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0178940.
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