A computational and theoretical investigation of the accuracy of quasicontinuum methods

Abstract

We give computational results to study the accuracy of several quasicontinuum methods for two benchmark problems – the stability of a Lomer dislocation pair under shear and the stability of a lattice to plastic slip under tensile loading. We find that our theoretical analysis of the accuracy near instabilities for onedimensional model problems can successfully explain most of the computational results for these multi-dimensional benchmark problems. However, we also observe some clear discrepancies, which suggest the need for additional theoretical analysis and benchmark problems to more thoroughly understand the accuracy of quasicontinuum methods.