ABSTRACT

Interfacial defects like grain boundaries and phase boundaries play an
important role in the mechanical behaviour of engineering alloys. In this
work the problem of a crack on a bi-crystal interface is studied at the
at\omic scale, with the goal of elucidating the effects of varying
interatomic interaction on crack behaviour and to assess the suitability
of existing fracture criteria to the anisotropic bi-crystal case.
Calculations are performed using the Quasicontinuum (QC) method. Using
suitable approximations, some of the existing fracture criteria were used
to predict ductile or brittle fracture and compared to the QC results.