Methods for atomistic abrasion simulations of laterally periodic polycrystalline substrates with fractal surfaces

Abstract

In this work we discuss a method to generate laterally periodic polycrystalline samples with fractal surfaces for use in molecular dynamics simulations of abrasion. We also describe a workflow that allows us to produce random lateral distributions of simple but realistically shaped hard abrasive particles with Gaussian size distribution and random particle orientations. We evaluate some on-the-fly analysis and visualization possibilities that may be applied during a molecular dynamics simulation to considerably reduce the post-processing effort. Finally, we elaborate on a parallelizable post-processing approach to evaluating and visualizing the surface topography, the grain structure and orientation, as well as the temperature distribution in large atomistic systems.