The objective of this paper is to examine the instability characteristics of both a bulk FCC crystal  and a (100) surface of an FCC crystal under uniaxial stretching along a <100> direction using an atomistic-based nonlocal instability criterion.  By comparison to benchmark atomistic simulations, we demonstrate that for both the FCC bulk and (100) surface, about 5000-10000 atoms are required in order to obtain an accurate converged value for the instability strain and a converged instability mode.  The instability modes are fundamentally different at the surface as compared to the bulk, but in both cases a strong dependence of the instability mode on the number of atoms that are allowed to participate in the instability process is observed.  In addition, the nonlo

11th US National Congress on Computational Mechanics

July 25-29, 2011. Minneapolis, MN

A mini-symposium on Recent Advances in Nonlocal Computational Mechanics

Abstract submission deadline: January 31, 2011 (minisymposium 3.3)