Final Report Summary - SIZEFFECTS (Size effects in fracture and plasticity)
The SIZEFFECTS project made important progress in understanding the role in fracture size effects of elasticinteractions, strain rate and temperature by numerical studies of disordered lattice models, molecular dynamics simulations of atomistic models
and theoretical calculations. This theoretical understanding was then applied to the study the fracture of nanoscale materials, like graphene or amorphous silica nanowires, and of biological and bio-inspired materials, such as cell membranes and filament networks. Furthermore, numerical and theoretical results obtained during the SIZEFFECTS project for plastically deforming materials have uncovered intriguing statistical properties in the deformation of micro-scale materials with implications for large scale deformation in the geological context. The SIZEFFECTS project achieved a comprehensive understanding of the scale dependent features of plastic deformation in crystalline, polycrystalline and amorphous materials with application in different contexts, from soft colloidal matter to hard metallic materials. Ideas, statistical methods and theoretical tools developed throughout the SIZEFFECTS project have been applied to a wide variety of related phenomena in materials science, physics and biology.