Studying Mechanical Response of Aligned Silver Nano-Composites Using Hybrid Molecular Dynamics-Finite Element Modeling

Fiber reinforced nano-composites are gaining conspicuous importance in several industrial fields due to their superior strength to weigh ratio, fatigue and fracture resistance and damping characteristics. Since experimental procedures in determination and characterization of material properties at nano-scales are considerably expensive, development of modeling and simulation techniques is an ongoing research area and numerous related researches have been carried out during the past decade. In this paper, mechanical properties of a silver nano-composite has been studied. In this investigation, a hybrid Molecular Dynamics (MD) - Finite Element (FE) modelling has been utilized in order to study the mechanical response of aligned silver (Ag) nano fibber composites. Then the effects of nano fibers aspect ratio and volume fractions on the nano-composite stressstrain response and its energy absorption during displacement controlled loading conditions are studied. The presented Hybrid MD-FE method includes two main steps: the first step includes MD modelings of uniaxial tension of Ag FCC nano specimens in order to obtain their stress-strain response, which can be utilized in the second step, to develop threedimensional FE models of nano-composite unit-cells. The Sutton-Chen potential is used in MD simulations combined with periodic boundary conditions and the Velocity Verlet formulation of Nose-Hoover dynamics to fix the temperature during the loading condition. The results clearly illustrate a major improvement in the mechanical properties of the fiberreinforced composite. It has been demonstrated that the governing parameter is the volume fraction of the fibers while the aspect ratio and other factors do not have a remarkable effect on the mechanical properties of silver nano-composites.

کلیدواژه ها:

Molecular Dynamics ، Finite Element ، Polymer Nano-Composite ، Agand Ni nano fibers