First-principles calculations of hydrogen trapping energy at an edge dislocation core in iron

Abstract

Understanding the mechanism of hydrogen embrittlement in steel requires knowledge of hydrogen trapping behavior at lattice defects in iron. However, first-principles calculations using atomistic modeling of an edge dislocation core in body-centered cubic ferromagnetic iron remain challenging because they require several hundred atoms for the core structure and must account for the influence of a long-range strain field around the core. We calculated the hydrogen trapping energies at iron’s most common edge dislocation core from first principles; we used a relatively small unit cell (378 Fe atoms) containing two cores of opposite signs with periodic boundary conditions. The cell size dependence of the hydrogen trapping energies was estimated using a recently developed machine-learning neural network potential for the iron-hydrogen system. Although the small cell size led to overestimating the trapping energy, it was less than 10 %.