HEMI Seminar: Franz Bamer, “Predicting mechanical response in network glasses”

Predicting mechanical response in network glasses

Franz Bamer, RWTH Aachen University

Attend in person: JHU Homewood campus, Malone Hall, G 33/35

Silica is one of the most abundant materials in the earth’s crust and is extensively used in industrial applications and everyday life. The vitreous form of silica reveals an arrangement of corner-sharing Si-O4 tetrahedra generating rings of various shapes and sizes embedded in a highly complex network structure. In this presentation, I will discuss the influence of such three-dimensional network structures on the mechanical behavior of silicate glasses. Both the brittle-to-ductile transition and elementary events in silicate glasses are considered in light of a prediction approach for the reversibility of shear events using polynomial regression. A Dual Monte Carlo Bond Switching algorithm is used to generate computational two-dimensional glass model structures based on the image of a real two-dimensional silica polymorph. These two-dimensional networks bring further insights into how network glasses deform and rupture under mechanical loading.

Franz Bamer leads the Computational Mechanics group at the Institute of General Mechanics at RWTH Aachen University. He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanics and a Master’s degree in Civil Engineering from the Technical University of Vienna, both of which he finished with distinction. He received the Open Seed Fund within the excellence initiatives of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany in 2020 and 2021 and the Theodore von Kármán Fellowship from the German Research Fund. Although his interests lie within the broad field of Computational and Structural Mechanics on different time and length scales, he is particularly focused on the mechanics of network glasses and materials on the nanoscale.