Manufacturing techniques in micro- and sub-micro scales, such as burnishing, indentations, and imprinting, may involve the plastic deformations of a thin metallic/polymeric layer. Carefully studying these deformations is vital to ensure the dimensional accuracy of the finished product. However, in computational mechanics, it is often challenging to develop high-fidelity solvers for micron and sub-micron scales manufacturing. The task is difficult mainly because the problem characteristic’s length lands on the interface of continuum-level and molecular dynamics scales that could lead to inaccurate or computationally intractable results.

At the Design for Nanomanufacturing Lab at UC Berkeley and in collaboration with the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Inprentus Inc., where revolutionary manufacturing of mechanically-ruled blazed diffraction gratings occurs, we designed and developed an open-source and open-access tool to study the inelastic behavior of thin metallic films under various mechanical loading conditions. The solver is designed to benefit from high-performance- and scientific-computing open source libraries which enabled us to simulate computationally expensive problems including capturing concurrent material, geometrical, and boundary condition nonlinearities.

Elyas Goli is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Design for Nanomanufacturing Lab in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Structural Engineering and Mechanics with a graduate specialization in Computational Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research lies at the intersection of advanced manufacturing, computational multiphysics, machine learning, and scientific computing.

Berkeley Nanosciences and Nanoengineering Institute

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Elyas Goli (2021), "PlasFilm: An Open Access Solver for Elastoplastic Modeling of Thin Films," https://nanohub.org/resources/34873.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. nanomanufacturing
2. nanoMFG Node
3. thin films