A refinement indicator for adaptive quasicontinuum approaches for structural lattices

The quasicontinuum method is a concurrent multiscale approach in which lattice models are fully resolved in small regions of interest and coarse-grained elsewhere. Since the method was originally proposed to accelerate atomistic lattice simulations, its refinement criteria – that drive refining coarse-grained regions and/or increasing fully-resolved regions – are generally associated with quantities relevant to the atomistic scale. In this contribution, a new refinement indicator is presented, based on the energies of dedicated cells at coarse-grained domain surfaces. This indicator is incorporated in an adaptive scheme of a generalization of the quasicontinuum method able to consider periodic representative volume elements, like the ones employed in most computational homogenization approaches. However, this indicator can also be used for conventional quasicontinuum frameworks. Illustrative numerical examples of elastic indentation and scratch of different lattices demonstrate the capabilities of the refinement indicator and its impact on adaptive quasicontinuum simulations.