Effective mechanical properties of micro/nano-scale porous materials considering surface effects

Abstract

Mechanical behavior in nano-sized structures differs from those in macro sized structures due to surface effect. As the ratio of surface to volume increases, surface effect is not negligible and causes size-dependent mechanical behavior. In order to identify this size effect, atomistic simulations are required; however, it has many limitations because too much computational resource and time are needed. To overcome the restrictions of the atomistic simulations and graft the well-established continuum theories, the continuum model considering surface effect, which is based on the bridging technique between atomistic and continuum simulations, is introduced. Because it reflects the size effect, it is possible to carry out a variety of analysis which is intractable in the atomistic simulations. As a part of the application examples, the homogenization method is applied to micro/nano thin films with porosity and the homogenized elastic coefficients of the nano scale thickness porous films are computed in this paper.