We have secured an ARCHER eCSE Award for the project titled "Open source exascale multi-scale framework for the UK solid mechanics community". The ARCHER eCSE Award provides 12 months software development effort over the 2015/16 academic year.

The aim of the project is (i) to improve the scaling of our prototype Cellular Automata Finite Element (CA-FE) multi-scale modelling framework (which links CGPACK with ParaFEM ) and (ii) to optimise the I/O performance of the core ParaFEM libraries, reducing the time taken to read in models and write out the results. This builds on work carried out in a previous project .

Our state of the art work in this area is focused on understanding the mechanical behaviour of polycrystals on scales from the sub-grain (micro- or nano-scale), through to multiple grains (meso-scale) and engineering (macro) scales. Such a framework could be used to predict and study a range of problems in materials science and engineering: dynamic recrystallisation, ductile to brittle transition fractures in steels, fracture of nuclear graphite, crack paths, partition of the total fracture energy into parts due to different physical processes (e.g. cleavage, ductile via void growth and coalescence, ductile shear, grain boundary failure), nano-grain instability and abnormal grain growth, adiabatic shear localisation, influence of microstructure variability on deformation and fracture energies, and so on.

Most of these problems are still poorly understood. Availability of a flexible and reliable predictive modelling tool, capable of analysing these problems, will boost research in these areas, aid understanding of these processes and help engineers and materials scientists in their quest for new high performance materials and cheaper, stronger and longer lasting machines and structures. The proposed framework will aid inter-disciplinary work, because it lies at the intersection of traditional disciplines - mechanical engineering, solid mechanics, materials science, constitutive modelling, experimental solid state physics, numerical methods and HPC.

Related Articles

To find out more about this research, please consult the following articles:

• Shterenlikht A. and Margetts L., 2015, "Three dimensional cellular automata modelling of cleavage propagation across crysal boundaries in polycrystalline microstructures" Proceedings of the Royal Society A
• Shterenlikht A., Margetts L., Cebamanos L. and Henty D., 2015, "Fortran 2008 Coarrays" ACM SIGPLAN Fortran Forum

Further Information

For further information and/or to discuss sponsoring this initiative through PhD studentships, industrial collaboration or consultancy, please contact:

• Dr Anton Shterelikht (Principal Investigator), University of Bristol
• Dr Lee Margetts , University of Manchester
• Professor David Emerson , Science and Technology Facilities Council

This work is funded under the embedded CSE programme of the ARCHER UK National Supercomputing Service .