Engineering Commons^™

Crack Propagation Simulation Tool, Nilofer Rajpurkar, Hojin Kim, Alejandro Strachan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

In the massively engineered world that exists today, understanding material behavior is of paramount importance in caring for human safety in design. Molecular dynamic simulations on crack propagation through materials allow visualization of material behavior under stress. The tool, developed by the nanoHUB group as a part of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology at Purdue University, makes performing such simulations accessible to undergraduate students, highly qualified researchers, and all those in between. First, the input deck for the simulation parameters was simplified from the complex, language-specific code into a simple, user-friendly Graphic User Interface (GUI). Several interesting example cases were …