The surface effects on solid and hollow nanowires under diametral loading

Abstract

The size effects of energetic surfaces on the elastic behavior of solid and hollow nanowires are investigated under diametral loading for the first time. In order to model the diametral compression test on nanowires, the structural version of the locally-exact theory is developed for solid and hollow nanowires (LETNW) by considering energetic surfaces attached at the boundaries of bulk materials and modeled using the Gurtin-Murdoch model. The developed analytical solutions employ Fourier series representations of displacement fields in the cylindrical coordinate system that exactly satisfy the governing differential equations, facilitating rapid convergence of full-field stress distributions. The solution's accuracy is validated against the in-house finite-element (FE) program which is currently the computational standard, where excellent agreement is obtained. The surface effects on the local stresses are then illustrated by varying the surface parameters, loading angle, dimension of nanowires, as well as residual surface stress. The efficiency of the LETNW is attributed to its analytical nature and thus consumes much less execution time relative to the FE implementation. What's more, instabilities associated with the solution of stress fields are observed with surface properties in certain crystallographic orientations for both LETNW and FE approaches. Contrary to the LETNW technique, the bifurcation phenomenon is shown to depend on the finite-element mesh refinement. The locally-exact theory provides an alternative and independent way of identifying surface bifurcations in solid and hollow nanowires and hence is a good tool in assessing the finite-element method as well as other approaches’ predictive capability for this class of materials.