Sharif Digital Repository

The energetics and kinetic energy barriers of vacancy/atom exchange in a 37-atom truncated octahedron Ag-Pt binary cluster in the Ag-rich range of compositions are investigated via a first-principles atomistic approach. The energy of the local minima obtained considering various distributions of a single vacancy and a few Pt atoms within the cluster and the energy barriers connecting them are evaluated using accurate density-functional calculations. The effects of the simultaneous presence of a vacancy and Pt atoms are found to be simply additive when their distances are larger than first-neighbors, whereas when they can be stabilizing at low Pt content due to the release of strain by the... 

The usual continuum theories are inadequate in predicting the mechanical behavior of solids in the presence of small defects and stress concentrators; it is well known that such continuum methods are unable to detect the change of the size of the inhomogeneities and defects. For these reasons various augmented continuum theories and strain gradient theories have been proposed in the literature. The major difficulty in implication of these theories lies in the lack of information about the additional material constants which appear in such theories. For fcc metals, for the calculation of the associated characteristic lengths which arise in first strain gradient theory, an atomistic approach... 

The effect of surface and interface elasticity in the analysis of the Saint-Venant torsion problem of an eccentrically two-phase fcc circular nanorod is considered; description of the behavior of such a small structure via usual classical theories cease to hold. In this work, the problem is formulated in the context of the surface/interface elasticity. For a rigorous solution of the proposed problem, conformal mapping with a Laurent series expansion are employed together. The numerical results well illustrate that the torsional rigidity and stress distribution corresponding to such nanosized structural elements are significantly affected by the size. In order to employ surface and interface...