  Onset of vacuum arcing near a metal surface is often associated with
nanoscale asperities, which may dynamically appear due to different processes
ongoing in the surface and subsurface layers in the presence of high electric
fields. Thermally activated processes, as well as plastic deformation caused by
tensile stress due to an applied electric field, are usually not accessible by
atomistic simulations because of long time needed for these processes to occur.
On the other hand, finite element methods, able to describe the process of
plastic deformations in materials at realistic stresses, do not include surface
properties. The latter are particularly important for the problems where the
surface plays crucial role in the studied process, as for instance, in case of
plastic deformations at a nanovoid. In the current study by means of molecular
dynamics and finite element simulations we analyse the stress distribution in
single crystal copper containing a nanovoid buried deep under the surface. We
have developed a methodology to incorporate the surface effects into the solid
mechanics framework by utilizing elastic properties of crystals, pre-calculated
using molecular dynamic simulations. The method leads to computationally
efficient stress calculations and can be easily implemented in commercially
available finite element software, making it an attractive analysis tool.
