Modeling segregated solutes in plastically deformed alloys using coupled molecular dynamics-Monte Carlo simulations

A microscopic understanding of the complex solute-defect interaction is pivotal for optimizing the alloy's macroscopic mechanical properties. Simulating solute segregation in a plastically deformed crystalline system at atomic resolution remains challenging. The objective is to efficiently model and predict a physically informed segregated solute distribution rather than simulating a series of diffusion kinetics. To address this objective, we coupled molecular dynamics (MD) and Monte Carlo (MC) methods using a novel method based on virtual atoms technique. We applied our MD-MC coupling approach to model off-lattice carbon (C) solute segregation in nanoindented Fe-C samples containing complex dislocation networks. Our coupling framework yielded the final configuration through efficient parallelization and localized energy computations, showing C Cottrell atmospheres near dislocations. Different initial C concentrations resulted in a consistent trend of C atoms migrating from less crystalline distortion to high crystalline distortion regions. Besides unraveling the strong spatial correlation between local C concentration and defect regions, our results revealed two crucial aspects of solute segregation preferences: (1) defect energetics hierarchy and (2) tensile strain fields near dislocations. The proposed approach is generic and can be applied to other material systems as well. (c) 2024 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The editorial office of Journal of Materials Science & Technology. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)