Publications

This report summarizes materials issues associated with advanced micromachines development at Sandia. The intent of this report is to provide a perspective on the scope of the issues and suggest future technical directions, with a focus on computational materials science. Materials issues in surface micromachining (SMM), Lithographic-Galvanoformung-Abformung (LIGA: lithography, electrodeposition, and molding), and meso-machining technologies were identified. Each individual issue was assessed in four categories: degree of basic understanding; amount of existing experimental data capability of existing models; and, based on the perspective of component developers, the importance of the issue to be resolved. Three broad requirements for micromachines emerged from this process. They are: (1) tribological behavior, including stiction, friction, wear, and the use of surface treatments to control these, (2) mechanical behavior at microscale, including elasticity, plasticity, and the effect of microstructural features on mechanical strength, and (3) degradation of tribological and mechanical properties in normal (including aging), abnormal and hostile environments. Resolving all the identified critical issues requires a significant cooperative and complementary effort between computational and experimental programs. The breadth of this work is greater than any single program is likely to support. This report should serve as a guide to plan micromachines development at Sandia.

Predicting the properties of nonequilibrium systems from molecular simulations is a growing area of interest. One important class of problems involves steady state diffusion. To study these cases, a grand canonical molecular dynamics approach has been developed by Heffelfinger and van Swol [J. Chem. Phys., 101, 5274 (1994)]. With this method, the flux of particles, the chemical potential gradients, and density gradients can all be measured in the simulation. In this paper, we present a complementary approach that couples a nonlocal density functional theory (DFT) with a transport equation describing steady-state flux of the particles. We compare transport-DFT predictions to GCMD results for a variety of ideal (color diffusion), and nonideal (uphill diffusion and convective transport) systems. In all cases excellent agreement between transport-DFT and GCMD calculations is obtained with diffusion coefficients that are invariant with respect to density and external fields.

Dual control volume grand canonical molecular dynamics (DCV-GCMD) is a boundary-driven non-equilibrium molecular dynamics technique for simulating gradient driven diffusion in multi-component systems. Two control volumes are established at opposite ends of the simulation box. Constant temperature and chemical potential of diffusing species are imposed in the control volumes. This results in stable chemical potential gradients and steady-state diffusion fluxes in the region between the control volumes. We present results and detailed analysis for a new constant-pressure variant of the DCV-GCMD method in which one of the diffusing species for which a steady-state diffusion flux exists does not have to be inserted or deIeted. Constant temperature, pressure and chemical potential of all diffusing species except one are imposed in the control volumes. The constant-pressure method can be applied to situations in which insertion and deletion of large molecules would be prohibitively difficult. As an exampIe, we used the method to shnulate diffusion in a biruuy mixture of spherical particles with a 2:1 size ratio. Steady-state diffusion fluxes of both diffbsi.ng species were established. The constant-pressure diffision coefficients agreed closely with the results of the standard constant-volume calculations. In addition, we show how the concentration, chemical potential and flux profiles can be used to calculate kwd binary and Maxwell-Stefim diffusion coefficients. In the case of the 2:1 size ratio mixture, we found that the binary dlffision coefficients were asymmetric and composition dependent, whereas the Maxwell-Stefan diffision coefficients changed very little with composition and were symmetric. This last result verified that the Gibbs-Duhem relation was satisfied locally, thus validating the assumption of local equilibrium.