Special Session 195: Calculus of Variations and Hyperbolic PDEs in Solid Mechanics

Energy barriers for boundary nucleation in solid-solid phase transitions
Konstantinos Zemas
University of Bonn
Germany
Co-Author(s):    Antonio Tribuzio
Abstract:
We study energy-scaling laws for a simplified, singularly perturbed, double-well nucleation problem confined in a half-space, in the absence of gauge invariance and for an inclusion of fixed volume. Motivated by models for boundary nucleation of a single-phase martensite inside a parental phase of austenite, our main focus is how the relationship between the rank-1 direction and the orientation of the half-space influences the energy scaling with respect to the fixed volume of the inclusion. Up to prefactors depending on this relative orientation, the scaling laws coincide with the corresponding ones for bulk nucleation, for all rank-1 directions, but the ones normal to the confining hyperplane. In the latter, the scaling is as in a three-well problem in full space, resulting in a lower energy barrier. This is joint work with A. Tribuzio (Uni-Bonn).