News
Our new study shade new light on why magnesium, a promising lightweight metal, suffers from limited ductility. Using in-situ TEM and atomistic simulations, we discovered that <c+a> dislocations—initially key to plastic deformation—quickly become inactive, triggering dislocation avalanches and twinning. The culprit? Stacking faults that block further dislocation motion, offering crucial insights for designing tougher, more formable magnesium alloys. The manuscript is now published: Jeong et al., Nanoscale Mechanisms Limiting Non-Basal Plasticity in Magnesium, Acta Materialia 296 (2025) 121261.
MecaNano stands for "European Network for the Mechanics of Matter at the Nano-Scale" is a European Cooperation in Science & Technology (COST) Action running until 2026. The Action is intended as a broad international cooperation aiming to advance the multiscale understanding of the mechanical behavior of nanostructured materials.
The 3rd General Meeting in Krakow (Poland), May 19-21 2025, will bring together all stakeholders of the MecaNano community in order to discuss scientific progress in our field(s) and plan common activities. As co-leader of the working group "Experimental and simulation challenges" of the network and active stakeholder of the MecaNano community, we will be attending the meeting.
Joé Petrazoller, doctoral researcher in our group, just got his first article published in Computational Materials Science. His work explors the effects of elastc amistropy on solute segregation at low-angle grain boundaries, and the role of the polarizability tensor as intrisinc material property to evaluates segregation tendancy. The manuscript is available : J. Petrazoller et al., On the effect of elastic anisotropy and polarizability on solute segregation at low-angle grain boundaries, Computational Materials Science 249 (2025) 113642 [open access].
Houssam Kharouji, PhD student in the group since November 2021, successfully defended his PhD thesis on December 5, 2024. in front of a jury composed of Dr. Forest, Dr. Upadhyay, Dr. Tanguy, Dr. Thuillier, Dr. Berbenni and Dr. Dezerald, Houssam has defended his work on the micromechanical modeling of crystal defects informed by atomistic simulation [LinkedIn].
Internal length scales are key quantities in strain gradient-gradient plasticity models by governing the predicted mechanical behavior. However, the physical origin of such lengths is still unclear. In his 2nd manuscript, Houssam Kharouji, doctoral researcher in our group at the LEM3, shade some lights on such origin in the case of grain boundary structures and energies. The manuscript is available : Kharouji et al., On the atomistic origin of internal length scale in strain-gradient plasticity models: The case of grain boundary structures and energies, Acta Materialia 285 (2024) 120555 [open access].