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Size and strain rate effects in tensile strength of penta-twinned Ag nanowires

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Abstract

Penta-twinned Ag nanowires (pt-AgNWs) have recently attracted much attention due to their interesting mechanical and physical properties. Here we perform large-scale atomistic simulations to investigate the influence of sample size and strain rate on the tensile strength of pt-AgNWs. The simulation results show an apparent size effect in that the nanowire strength (defined as the critical stress for dislocation nucleation) increases with decreasing wire diameter. To account for such size effect, a theoretical model involving the interaction between an emerging dislocation and the twin boundary has been developed for the surface nucleation of dislocations. It is shown that the model predictions are in quantitative agreement with the results from atomistic simulations and previous experimental studies in the literatures. The simulations also reveal that nanowire strength is strain-rate dependent, which predicts an activation volume for dislocation nucleation in the range of 1–10\(b^{3}\), where b is the magnitude of the Burgers vector for a full dislocation.

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Acknowledgements

The project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 11372152 and 51420105001) and the National Natural Science Foundation of United States (Grant CMMI-1161749). The simulations were performed on the TianHe-1 supercomputer at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre of Advanced Mechanics and Materials, Department of Engineering Mechanics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 10084, China

    Xuan Zhang & Xiaoyan Li

  2. School of Engineering, Brown University, Providence, Rohde Island, 02912, USA

    Huajian Gao

Authors
  1. Xuan Zhang
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  2. Xiaoyan Li
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  3. Huajian Gao
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Xiaoyan Li or Huajian Gao.

Appendix

Appendix

Here we calculate the normal distance x from point C to twin plane ABD in Fig. 6. Triangle DBC is one fifth the size of a regular pentagon on the [110] plane. Triangles ABD and ACD are on two twin planes, while triangle ABC is a dislocation slip plane. As illustrated in Fig. 6, we can calculate the area of triangle ABC in two ways:

$$\begin{aligned} \frac{R^{2}\sin \frac{\theta }{2}\cos \frac{\theta }{2}}{\cos \beta }=\frac{x}{2}\sqrt{R^{2}+h^{2}}. \end{aligned}$$
(A1)

Note the following expression,

$$\begin{aligned} \tan \beta =\frac{h}{R\cos \frac{\theta }{2}}. \end{aligned}$$
(A2)

Combining Eqs. (A1) and (A2), we obtain \(2x=\eta D\), where \(\eta \) is expressed as

$$\begin{aligned} \eta =\frac{\sin \theta }{\cos \beta \sqrt{1+\left( {\cos \frac{\theta }{2}\tan \beta } \right) ^{2}}}. \end{aligned}$$
(A3)

Give that \(\theta =72.0{^{\circ }}\) and \(\beta =35.2{^{\circ }}\), then \(\eta =1.01\).

Fig. 6
figure 6

Geometrical illustration for twin planes and dislocation slip planes in a regular pentagonal column

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Zhang, X., Li, X. & Gao, H. Size and strain rate effects in tensile strength of penta-twinned Ag nanowires. Acta Mech. Sin. 33, 792–800 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10409-017-0675-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10409-017-0675-6

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