Uniaxial compression test on magnesium crystal

Below is the sample speciment that I worked with for my URA this past term. The video is of a 50x50x50 A specimen being loaded at a strain increment of 0.006. The specimen was also normalized to a temperature of 300 K (standard testing temperature). The colours indicate the distance of the atom to its neighbours, blue being the closest distance and red being the farthest.

The goal of this test is to observe dislocation patterns, that will arise as isolated pockets of atoms with a different number of neighbours.

The arrangement of HCP magnesium crytal was done using a geometry-generating MatLab code where the dimensions were inputted along with the rotational angle of pi/3 in order to more easily find the shear planes in the crystal.

LAMMPS is an open-source code that uses the geometric data and manipulates the structure as per the code (in this cade, relaxing then compressing).

AtomEye was then used to read these timestep intervals and transform them into the visual model below.