| AVS 61st International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Accelerating Materials Discovery for Global Competitiveness Focus Topic | Wednesday Sessions |
| Session MG-WeM |
| Session: | Design of New Materials |
| Presenter: | Veena Tikare, Sandia National Laboratories |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
The meso-scale materials modeling community, over the last two decades, has developed vast capabilities in microstructurally-based modeling of complex ceramic and metals. While several modeling techniques have been developed, the Potts kinetic Monte Carlo model and the phase-field model form the foundation of most materials modeling efforts for a variety of microstructural evolution processes experienced by ceramics and metals during fabrication and engineering service. Harnessing these modeling capabilities and applying them to design materials to tailor their microstructure for optimal engineering performance properties and designing fabrication processes to obtain the desired microstructure can greatly accelerate development and optimizing of materials for a large number of technologies. This presentation will give a general overview of the core capabilities of the microstructural evolution modeling capabilities by reviewing the two most commonly used methods, Potts and phase-field. The former is a discrete, statistical-mechanical model that has been successfully used to simulate many microstructural evolution processes, such as grain growth, sintering, coarsening in the presence of mobile and immobile pinning phase, and recrystallization. The phase-field model is a continuum, thermodynamic model that has been used to successful simulation solidification, phase transformation and coarsening processes. The capabilities and limitation of each model will be reviewed and appropriate application of the models to different materials microstructural evolution processes will be discussed. The presentation will also demonstrate how these two models can be applied to understand and predict materials processes including coarsening, sintering and phase transformations. Specific examples of microstructural modeling and their application to design materials microstructure for optimal performance will be presented and discussed. Examples will included simulation of microstructural evolution during sintering of complex powder compacts; the generation, transport and release of fission gases from nuclear fuels during service in a reactor; and development of grain shapes and sizes during welding processes. Finally, the current trends in microstructure model development will be discussed.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.