Scalable simulation of chemo-mechanical degradation for oxidation at extreme environments
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High temperature structural materials based load bearing components in aerospace, energy and high temperature industrial sectors experience oxidation induced degradation that results in their catastrophic failure. Formation of oxide layer involves intricate interplay between chemical species transport, oxide phase evolution, and mechanical deformation. Particularly, growth of the oxide layer leads to heterogeneous stress accumulation which is accompanied by plastic deformation and fracture. Thus, unlocking the underlying chemo-mechanical damage process, time efficient performance assessment of structural components under various operating conditions is highly necessary. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to develop a scalable simulation platform for prediction of component damage subjected to harsh environments. In the present work, a thermodynamically consistent numerical framework is developed to systematically account for oxygen transport, oxide layer formation, inelastic deformation and associated crack initiation and propagation. Separate phase field descriptors are utilized to indicate the oxide layer and crack growth in a diffusive manner. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics is employed to extract the constitutive relations and driving forces for the evolution laws of phase field variables. In elastic deformation is modelled using a visco-plastic flow rule while an energy density threshold based criterion is introduced for phase field fracture. To solve the governing equations in the time domain, a backward Euler scheme will be used. Finally, using Newton-Raphson method, a linearized system of equations will be constructed and will be solved in staggered iterative procedure. We intend to solve coupled discretized equations for component scale in time efficient manner with the requirement of domain discretization resolving sharp interfaces associated with the oxide phase layer and damage evolution. Therefore, the proposed computational framework will be implemented using Deal.II that allows adaptive mesh refinement and various solver integration. Finally, various simulation strategies will be evaluated towards accelerated performance assessment at component scale for different service conditions.
