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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Building Modern Cloud Accessible Tools For Materials Simulations, Nicholas J. Finan, Saaketh Desai, Samuel Reeve, Alejandro Strachan Aug 2018

Building Modern Cloud Accessible Tools For Materials Simulations, Nicholas J. Finan, Saaketh Desai, Samuel Reeve, Alejandro Strachan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

In recent years, commercial computer systems have grown more user friendly, allowing for new users to quickly and easily make contributions. Unfortunately, this trend is not as apparent in the field of computational materials simulations. The tools used by researchers in this field have remained just as esoteric as the systems of the past. While the methods used in materials simulations continue to grow in complexity and accuracy, the user experience has been neglected entirely. This project aims to eliminate the need for hours spent adjusting file formats and searching for preexisting code, and instead allow researchers to focus on …


Thermal And Mechanical Properties Of Polymers Using Molecular Dynamics, Daniel Glass, Alejandro Strachan, Lorena Alzate-Vargas, Chunyu Li, Benjamin Haley Aug 2015

Thermal And Mechanical Properties Of Polymers Using Molecular Dynamics, Daniel Glass, Alejandro Strachan, Lorena Alzate-Vargas, Chunyu Li, Benjamin Haley

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Polymer systems have gained attention during the past years because of their technological and industrial applications. Simulations, particularly molecular dynamics, are very useful for exploring properties of amorphous polymers, without using experiments. Our goal is to create a readily-available tool that will perform MD simulations in order to get thermal and mechanical properties (Glass transition temperature, Young Modulus) of the polymers. The work that has been done will be part of a tool to help people to learn about polymer properties including Glass Transition Temperature. We model some polymers at a scale of 10,000 atoms. The tool uses LAMMPS to …


Building Predictive Chemistry Models, Christopher Browne, Nicolas Onofrio, Alejandro Strachan Aug 2014

Building Predictive Chemistry Models, Christopher Browne, Nicolas Onofrio, Alejandro Strachan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Density Functional Theory (DFT) simulations allow for sophisticated modeling of chemical interactions, but the extreme computational cost makes it inviable for large scale applications. Molecular dynamics models, specifically ReaxFF, can model much larger simulations with greater speed, but with lesser accuracy. The accuracy of ReaxFF can be improved by comparing predictions of both methods and tuning ReaxFF’s parameters. Molecular capabilities of ReaxFF were gauged by simulating copper complexes in water over a 200 ps range, and comparing energy predictions against ReaxFF. To gauge solid state capabilities, volumetric strain was applied to simulated copper bulk and the strain response functions used …


Molecular Exploration Tool, Weiyi Cao, Nicolas Onofrio, Alejandro Strachan Aug 2014

Molecular Exploration Tool, Weiyi Cao, Nicolas Onofrio, Alejandro Strachan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Density Functional Theory (DFT) which is based on quantum mechanics theory has been broadly used to compute the energy and the structure of molecules and solids. However, the DFT method is limited when running calculations for a large system and only thousands of atoms can be solved. Alternatively, Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulation can be used to investigate the properties of the atomic system for large systems in the classical mechanics approximation. When running the MD simulation, the electronic structure is approximated by Force Fields (FF) which can be parametrized against DFT calculations. Nevertheless, the accuracy of the MD results and …


Crack Propagation Simulation Tool, Nilofer Rajpurkar, Hojin Kim, Alejandro Strachan Aug 2014

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 …