Multiscale modeling of nanoindentation in copper thin films via the concurrent coupling of the meshless Hermite–Cloud method with molecular dynamics

Abstract This paper investigates the 2D nanoindentation of a copper thin film using a concurrent multiscale method. The method uses molecular dynamics (MD) simulation in the atomistic region, the strong-form meshless Hermite–Cloud method in the continuum region and a handshaking algorithm to concurrently couple them. A fully atomistic simulation is also carried out to validate the multiscale method. The results, namely the load versus indentation depth graph obtained from the multiscale method shows only slight quantitative variation from that of the full atomistic model. More importantly, the graphs from both simulations show a similar trend thus validating the 2D multiscale method. The displacement profile without discontinuities further supports the efficiency of the multiscale method in ensuring smooth exchange of information between the atomistic and continuum domains. The material properties extracted from the simulation include the force/unit length values obtained by dividing the maximum load on the indenter by its contact perimeter, instead of the hardness value obtained in 3D simulations. By restricting the atomic scale detail to the critical regions beneath the indenter, the multiscale method effectively saves computational resources to more than one order (close to 13 times less for this problem), thus making it feasible to simulate problems of larger dimensions that are not amenable to complete atomistic simulations.