Describing Interstitials in Close-packed Lattices: First-principles Study

Describing interstitial atoms in intermetallics or simple mono-atomic close-packed metals is a straightforward procedure in common full-potential calculations. One establishes a sufficiently large supercell, introduces the interstitial impurity and performs the electronic structure and total energy calculation. Real systems, however, are rarely mono-atomic or ordered metals. In most of the cases, the matrix is a random or quasirandom mixture of several chemically and/or magnetically distinct components. Because of that a proper computational tool should incorporate advanced alloy theory and at the same time have sufficiently high accuracy to describe interstitial positions in close-packed solids. The purpose of the present thesis is to make a step towards solving this fundamental problem in computational materials science. To this end, in the first part of the thesis a prestudy on some selected metals and compounds was presented, and in the second part tools were applied to investigate the effect of interstitial carbon on the structural properties of steels. For the prestudy, the equation of state for the selected Al, Cu and Rh was investigated in two equivalent phases: in conventional face-centered-cubic lattice (fcc, str-I) and in a face-centered-cubic lattice with one atomic and three interstitial empty potentialwells per primitive cell (str-II). A proper basis set of the exact muffin-tin orbitals as well as a proper potential sphere radius were established by calculating the equilibrium Wigner-Seitz radius and bulk modulus of the above elements in str-I and str-II using the exact muffin-tin orbitals (EMTO) first-principle density functional method. It was found that for Al spd orbitals are sufficient to describe the equilibrium bulk properties in both structures, while for str-II Rh and Cu at least five orbitals (spdfg) are needed to get accurate equilibrium volume and bulk modulus. Furthermore, it was shown that in general, for the str-II type of structure (close-packed structure with interstitials) the optimized overlapping muffin-tin potential in combination with spdfg orbitals ensures well converged bulk properties. As an application of the above work in alloys, (i) the chemical reaction between hydrogen H 2 molecule and ScAl 1−x Mg x (0≤ x ≤0.3) random alloys, (ii) the phase stability of the hydrogenated alloys in different structures and (iii) the hydrogen absorption/desorption temperatures were studied by calculating the Gibbs energy for the com