Multiple Length and Time-scale Approaches in Materials Modeling

Abstract

Multiscale modeling has become an essential tool in understanding and designing materials and physical systems with characteristics at multiple length and time scales. Although modern computational techniques are able to track the material behaviors from the nano-scale atomic vibrations at femtoseconds to the macroscopic plastic deformations of metals at seconds, simulations of physical phenomena of engineering interest are often limited by overwhelming computation time. The objective of multiscale methods is to predict the important physical behaviors without resolving the full details of the system, through averaging/coarse-graining the structure in length and/or extracting the slow time-scale dynamics. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art multiscale methods with applications in material science and biological systems.