Accelerating electrostatic pair methods on graphical processing units to study molecules in supercritical carbon dioxide

Traditionally, electrostatic interactions are modelled using Ewald techniques, which provide a good approximation, but are poorly suited to GPU architectures. We use the GPU versions of the LAMMPS MD package to implement and assess the Wolf summation method. We compute transport and structural properties of pure carbon dioxide and mixtures of carbon dioxide with either methane or difluoromethane. The diffusion of pure carbon dioxide is indistinguishable when using the Wolf summation method instead of PPPM on GPUs. The optimum value of the potential damping parameter, α, is 0.075. We observe a decrease in accuracy when the system polarity increases, yet the method is robust for mildly polar systems. We anticipate the method can be used for a number of techniques, and applied to a variety of systems. Substitution of PPPM can yield a two-fold decrease in the wall-clock time

Finite-temperature atomic structure of 180° ferroelectric domain walls in PbTiO

In this letter we obtain the finite-temperature structure of 180° domain walls in PbTiO3 using a quasi-harmonic–lattice dynamics approach. We obtain the temperature dependence of the atomic structure of domain walls from 0 K up to room temperature. We also show that both Pb-centered and Ti-centered 180° domain walls are thicker at room temperature; domain wall thickness at T = 300 K is about three times larger than that of T = 0 K. Our calculations show that Ti-centered domain walls have a lower free energy than Pb-centered domain walls and hence are more likely to be seen at finite temperatures

A Geometric Theory of Nonlinear Morphoelastic Shells

Many thin three-dimensional elastic bodies can be reduced to elastic shells: two-dimensional elastic bodies whose reference shape is not necessarily flat. More generally, morphoelastic shells are elastic shells that can remodel and grow in time. These idealized objects are suitable models for many physical, engineering, and biological systems. Here, we formulate a general geometric theory of nonlinear morphoelastic shells that describes both the evolution of the body shape, viewed as an orientable surface, as well as its intrinsic material properties such as its reference curvatures. In this geometric theory, bulk growth is modeled using an evolving referential configuration for the shell, the so-called material manifold. Geometric quantities attached to the surface, such as the first and second fundamental forms, are obtained from the metric of the three-dimensional body and its evolution. The governing dynamical equations for the body are obtained from variational consideration by assuming that both fundamental forms on the material manifold are dynamical variables in a Lagrangian field theory. In the case where growth can be modeled by a Rayleigh potential, we also obtain the governing equations for growth in the form of kinetic equations coupling the evolution of the first and the second fundamental forms with the state of stress of the shell. We apply these ideas to obtain stress-free growth fields of a planar sheet, the time evolution of a morphoelastic circular cylindrical shell subject to time-dependent internal pressure, and the residual stress of a morphoelastic planar circular shell