Thermomechanical study of nanovoid cavitation in aluminium

Defects such as vacancies and nanovoids are known to drastically modify the structural state of materials. Void nucleation, growth and coalescence are important micromechanical mechanisms underlying ductile crack growth in metals. In high-purity metals, void nucleation often operates at the nanoscale and is followed by plastic cavitation when the void attains the critical pressure for dislocation emission. This work is concerned with the thermomechanical study of plastic nanovoid cavitation in aluminium (Al) single crystals under triaxial load using the HotQC method. HotQC is a multiscale modeling scheme that seamlessly links continuum and atomistic descriptions at finite temperature. This work provides a detailed characterization of the void growth and cavitation mechanism, including the emitted dislocations, the dislocation reaction paths and attendant macroscopic quantities of interest such as the cavitation stress and temperature evolution as well as a comparison with a previous work carried out at 0K