Atomistic Investigation on the Effects of Thermal Loading on Interfacial Adhesion of Dissimilar Materials

Heat transfer has a large effect on the adhesion and the corresponding failure at material interfaces. When a system becomes extremely small, the conventional finite element method is not capable of accurately capturing all the information, and precise modeling of interfacial properties is essential. In this paper, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are used to investigate the effects of heat transfer on the adhesion properties of material interfaces. For Al-W and Cr-W interfaces, the interfacial strengths are calculated by MD simulations and are compared with the critical loads obtained from scratch tests. Both the results of MD simulations and experiments show that the interfacial strength of an Al-W interface is larger than that for a Cr-W interface; and furthermore, the Cr-W interface is more sensitive to thermal loading than the Al-W interface. In this work we concluded that the proposed MD model can be used to estimate interfacial adhesion under the effects of heat transfer. (C) Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011