A problem of compacting a mixture of copper and molybdenum nanopowders under the action of external loading generated by a spherical piston is solved by the molecular dynamics method. Interatomic interaction is calculated with the use of a multiparticle potential obtained by the embedded atom method. It is shown that compaction leads to significant deformations in copper, resulting in the loss of the crystalline structure; copper nanoparticles melt and fill the entire porous space. Molybdenum particles are deformed to a much smaller extent; they are not destroyed and preserve their crystalline structure. Under high loading, there appear voids in copper at the stage of compact extension; these voids rapidly grow in size and coagulate into one large void located in the nanocell center.Introduction. One promising method of obtaining new materials is compaction of micro-and nanopowders in shock waves [1-3]. The energy applied to a system at the macroscopic level is transferred to the nanoscopic level, where it is transformed to the energy of bonding of atoms forming the compact. The difficulties arising in mathematical modeling of nanopowder compaction are caused by the wide range of scales of the processes playing a significant role in compaction. An approximate technique, which allows these difficulties to be overcome, was proposed in [4,5] by an example of copper nanopowder compaction. First, the problem of compacting a nanocell under pulsed loading is solved by the molecular dynamics method. The solution obtained is averaged and yields the mean parameters, which allow the structure of the compact being formed to be determined. In the present work, this approach is extended to a mixture of copper (Cu) and molybdenum (Mo) powders. These materials were chosen because composites obtained by the method of explosive compaction from a mixture of Cu and Mo powders display high erosion resistance and are used for production of electrodes [6,7]. In addition, a detailed metallographic research of the Cu-Mo composite structure is reported in [7], and the calculated results can be compared with the experimental data [7].Formulation of the Problem. Let us consider a problem of compacting a spherical nanocell under pulsed loading applied to the outer surface of the piston (Fig. 1). Pulsed loading is transferred to the nanocell owing to interaction of the inner surface of the piston with atoms in the nanocell. The nanocell consists of four spherical Cu nanoparticles and four Mo nanoparticles of radius R p with dense cubic packing. The centers of the Cu and Mo particles are located in the vertices of a cube with a rib length l. There are voids in the nanocell center and on the side faces of the cube. The volume of the void located on the side face of the cube is half the volume of the void in the cube center.