The Capriccio group members Eva Richter and Lukas Laubert presented their ongoing research alongside other FRASCAL doctoral researchers on May 22, 2026, at the 13th FRASCAL Seminar.
Driven by the goal of deepening the understanding of the fracture behavior of thermoplastics, Eva Richter detailed her work on multiscale mechanics. She highlighted key insights from 30-million atom microscale MD benchmarks, specifically noting her fracture-related findings on the interplay between the rupture zone, the dead zone, and a widening pre-crack. To further this investigation, she introduced the “Capriccio Light” approach, which couples the MD-thermoplastic to a bulk material-mimicking lattice of much coarser particles, allowing for the study of coupling behavior without the overhead of integrating two distinct simulation methods.
Later in the program, Lukas Laubert presented his advancements towards FE-MD-coupled fracture simulations of epoxy. Aiming to conduct fracture investigations on MD samples under typical engineering boundary conditions, his presentation outlined three core areas of development. These targeted the discovery of a sensible bond-breakage criterion through MD modeling and the calibration of newly implemented constitutive models using the Ferrite.jl FEM-package. Finally, he presented extensions for the Capriccio method to allow FE-MD-coupled models to be accurately investigated across a wider range of load cases and a broader scope of spatial resolution.