All materials have atoms as their building blocks.
These regions, called grain boundaries and dislocations, have profound effects on the properties of metals and explain why a piece of metal can be deformed without breaking. This property is of decisive importance in all engineering applications, be it engines, bridges or space shuttles. This project aims at modelling the properties of grain boundaries and dislocations on an atomistic level. It is part of a larger project in materials science, the Brinell Centre , involving researchers in physics, chemistry and mechanical engineering. To compute the behaviour of even a few atoms by hand is a hopeless task.