Second funding period granted
We are very pleased to announce that our project „Interphase properties in nanocomposites“ has been granted funding by the German Science Foundation (DFG) for another 24 months (grant number 396414850). In this second funding period, we will validate our findings obtained in the first funding period and extend our approach to representative volume elements. To this end, we will further enhance and apply our methodology to identify continuum mechanical interphase properties from coupled finite elements and molecular dynamics simulations for nanocomposites with deviating particle sizes, shapes, and distributions, as well as to systems with and without surface functionalisation. Based on these studies, we will consider larger systems with multiple nanoparticles as subsidiary volume elements, which still enable a direct comparison between pure continuum models and our hybrid FE-MD treatment. Based on these, we will eventually study even higher numbers of filler particles in representative volume elements, whose size exceeds the capabilities of pure molecular and hybrid descriptions. In this case, the continuum models derived from the fine-scale investigations will be employed.