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An atomistic study of the deformation behavior of tungsten nanowires

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Abstract

Large-scale atomistic simulations are performed to study tensile and compressive \(\langle 112\rangle\) loading of single-crystalline nanowires in body-centered cubic tungsten (W). Effects of loading mode, wire cross-sectional shape, wire size, strain rate, and crystallographic orientations of the lateral surfaces are explored. Uniaxial deformation of a W bulk single crystal is also investigated for reference. Our results reveal a strong tension–compression asymmetry in both the stress–strain response and the deformation behavior due to different yielding/failure modes: while the nanowires fail by brittle fracture under tensile loading, they yield by nucleation of dislocations from the wire surface under compressive loading. It is found that (1) nanowires have a higher strength than the bulk single crystal; (2) with a cross-sectional size larger than 10 nm, there exists a weak dependence of strength on wire size; (3) when the wire size is equal to or smaller than 10 nm, nanowires buckle under compressive loading; (4) the cross-sectional shape, strain rate, and crystallographic orientations of the lateral surfaces affect the strength and the site of defect initiation but not the overall deformation behavior.

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Acknowledgements

The work of SX was supported in part by the Elings Prize Fellowship in Science offered by the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) on the UC Santa Barbara campus. SX also acknowledges support from the Center for Scientific Computing from the CNSI, MRL: an NSF MRSEC (DMR-1121053). This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation Grant Number ACI-1053575.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. California NanoSystems Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106-6105, USA

    Shuozhi Xu

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106-5070, USA

    Yanqing Su

  3. GWW School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332-0405, USA

    Dengke Chen

  4. School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332-0340, USA

    Longlei Li

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  1. Shuozhi Xu
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Correspondence to Shuozhi Xu.

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Xu, S., Su, Y., Chen, D. et al. An atomistic study of the deformation behavior of tungsten nanowires. Appl. Phys. A 123, 788 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-017-1414-3

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