Tensile and Flexural Deformation of Nickel Nanowires via Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Abstract

Metallic nanowires show great potential for applications in minimization of electronic devices due to their extraordinary mechanical strength and electrical properties. Their desirable property characteristics with the smallest dimensions for efficient transport of electrons show potential for use as interconnects and critical devices in nanoelectronics and nano-optoelectronics (Chen, et al., 2006). These metallic nanowires also show potential for applications in electronic packaging, nanoelectronic and nano mechanical devices. A significant issue in the application of these metallic nanowires is their structural strength and stability under mechanical and thermal loading conditions. The deformation behavior of these nanowires under different mechanical loads (for e.g., tensile, bending) is poorly known. Experimental investigations of these behaviors are impractical due to their size and the complications of applying these loading conditions via nano load cells within high resolution microscope systems. Computational techniques based on molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the representative atomistic configuration of the metallic nanowires provide an effective means of understanding the mechanical deformation behavior of these nanowires. In this chapter, we discuss the tensile and flexural dynamic deformation behavior of the Nickel (Ni) nanowires due to tensile loading and flexural bending via molecular dynamics simulations. The tensile and flexural deformation behaviors based on the atomistic model configurations of Nickel nanowires are analyzed. The stress-strain constitutive behavior, tensile strength and the Young’s modulus for various Ni nanowire configurations are investigated and presented. The natural frequency of the flexural deformation of these nanowires via molecular dynamics simulations is obtained and analyzed. The simulation of the deformation behavior in metallic nanowires modeled as atomistic systems at finite temperatures is a dynamic process and is conducted using classical molecular dynamics. Focusing on the mechanical behavior of nanowires, it is known that the properties of material configurations at nanometer dimensions can be rather different from those of the bulk material. In the past decades, the rapid progress of miniaturization of electronic devices and nanoscale measurement systems has aroused an interest in nanometer scale materials such as nanowires (Ju, 2004) (Liang, 2003) (Park, 2005) (Silva et. al., 2004), (Silva, 10