Structural and mechanical properties of alkali hydrides investigated by the first-principles calculations and principal component analysis

Abstract

The structural and mechanical properties of alkali hydrides (LiH, NaH, KH, RbH, and CsH) were investigated via first-principles calculations which cover the optimized structural parameters. The density functional theory in combination with the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) were used in this study. From the present study, one could note that alkali hydrides are brittle materials and mechanically stable. It was found that stiffness and shear resistance are greater in LiH than in other hydrides. It is more brittle in nature, and comparatively harder than the other materials under study; it also presents a high degree of anisotropy. The results were then investigated and analyzed with principal component analysis (PCA), which is one of the most common techniques in multivariate analysis, was used to explore the correlations among material properties of alkali hydrides and to study their trends. The alkali hydrides obtained by the first-principles calculations were also compared with the alkaline-earth metal hydrides (BeH2, MgH2, CaH2, SrH2, and BaH2) and discussed in this work.