Mesoscopic crystal plasticity and more – modeling, computing & sensing for aerospace applications
This seminar presents ongoing research dedicated to the development of physical models, computational methods and sensor concepts useful for aerospace materials and structures. It gives an overview of several sensing technologies designed to detect e.g. electrostatic-field nonuniformities, hazardous gas concentrations, mechanical motion/position-changes, fatigue-related damage in metals, fluid viscosity, etc.
The outlined sensor concepts are designed based on dynamical systems theory, multiphysical models and specialized numerical methods for discrete- and continuum-mechanics problems — some examples being finite-element and spectral solvers for PDEs, order-reduction and modal decomposition methods for ODEs, etc.
A detailed discussion is given on the recently developed automaton-form-based mesoscopic theory of crystal plasticity. A hybrid smooth–nonsmooth formulation is introduced, which models plastic deformation as a quantized process, enabling the numerical derivation of experimentally observed critical exponents. This approach allows the simulation of intermittent plasticity with computational speedup of 1-2 orders of magnitude compared to previous formulations.
While microscopic theories (e.g. DDD/CDD) resolve atomic-scale patterns in plastic deformation of real crystalline materials, they are computationally limited to small, sub-structural systems. Macroscopic theories, in contrast, being computationally efficient for large-scale systems, lack fundamental rigor, often relying on phenomenology.
The proposed mesoscopic approach constitutes a viable trade off, with potential applications in modeling crystalline ice buildup on airplanes, sensing fatigue-related damage in metal engine parts/landing-gear components, designing motion-detection devices based on controlled deformation in microcrystals, etc. In addition, the theory gives a coarse-graining methodology useful for high-performance computing of continua under rapid loading relevant e.g. for modeling of bird strike on aircraft.
