Numerical investigation of mechanical properties of aluminum-copper alloys at nanoscale

Nanoindentation is a powerful tool capable of providing fundamental insights of material elastic and plastic response at the nanoscale. Alloys at nanoscale are particularly interesting as the local heterogeneity and deformation mechanism revealed by atomistic study offers a better way to understand hardening mechanism to build a stronger material. In this work, nanoindentation in Al-Cu alloys are studied using atomistic simulations to investigate the effects of loading direction, alloying percentages of Cu via dislocation-driven mechanisms. Also, a low-fidelity finite element (FE) model has been developed for nanoindentation simulations where nanoscale materials properties are used from atomistic simulations. Material properties, such as hardness and reduced modulus, are computed from both the FE and MD simulations and then compared. Considering the fundamental difference between these two numerical approaches, the FE results obtained from the present study conform fairly with those from MD simulations. This paves a way into finding material properties of alloys with reduced simulation time and cost by using FE where high-fidelity results are not required. The results have been presented as load-displacement analysis, dislocation density, dislocation loops nucleation and propagation, von-Mises stress distribution and surface imprints. The techniques adopted in this paper to incorporate atomistic data into FE simulations can be further extended for finding other mechanical and fracture properties for complex alloy materials.