The Visualization Lab

Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Instability dynamics of fracture

The fracture of two-dimensional notched solids under tension was studied using million atom systems. Many recent laboratory findings occur in the simulation experiments, one of the most intriguing being the dynamic instability of the crack tip as it approaches a fraction of the sound speed.

Here are two animations that show visualizations of the large-scale (351 kB) as well as the atomistic (1.6 MB) dynamics. The visualizations were created using PV-WAVE.

Here is a hyper-media version of a paper about this study which was published in Physical Review Letters (Farid F. Abraham, D. Brodbeck, R.A. Rafey and W.E. Rudge, Phys. Rev. Lett. 73, 272 (1994)).

Colliding microasperities

This molecular dynamics simulation was motivated by the head-disk interface. Here are two animations showing two microasperities colliding at low

(209 kB) and high

(214 kB) impact velocities.
These visualizations were created using Data Explorer.

The states of tethered membranes

This is a presentation of various aspects of large-scale molecular-dynamics simulations of a model for tethered membranes.

You can look at

a brief overview,
a more extended introduction to this field,
a collection of abstracts of related publications and
a gallery with images and animations of visualizations of the simulated membranes.

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