Indentation of thin copper film using molecular dynamics and peridynamics

In this study we investigate the efficiency of peridynamics to reproduce results from molecular dynamic simulations of nanoindentation of thin single-crystal fcc copper layers by calibration of material parameters in the peridynamic model. The free-ware LAMMPS supports both molecular dynamic and peridynamics approaches, and has been used as the common framework. Nanoindentation response for two different crystallographic orientations has been simulated using both numerical approaches and the force-displacement curves from the simulations have been compared between the different approaches. The conclusion is that proper chose of the peridynamic material parameters results in proper reproduction of the molecular dynamic results for the nanoindentationtest. This opens for peridynamic simulations of geometrically more complicated structures to a much lower computational cost, retaining the mechanical response from the atomic scale.