Abstract

The research focus is in the development of material simulation methods based on or combined with up-to-date phase-field modeling techniques. The direction of research accounts for the comprehensive potential in the field of computational materials design by simulation of microstructure formations and phase transformations. The simulation techniques are capable to predict microstructure and mechanical property correlations for material systems with multiple components and phases under the consideration of different process conditions. Quality characteristics of materials and processes strongly vary with a change of the machining process or by varying the composition. Simulations allow for the first time the in-situ insight not only into the final microstructure, but also in the three-dimensional structure formation process. New developments for microstructure simulations incorporate the consideration of strain evolution and provide new insight into the responses of the material on an imposed thermal, mechanical and magnetic field. Another focus lies in the analysis of convection and driven fluid flow on mass and heat transfer as well as on the microstructure formation. The challenges of future are in the line of „Integrated Computational Materials Science and Engineering‘‘ aiming to virtually design production processes by comprehensive multiscale simulation methods and by integrating knowledge from experiments and computation. Besides the macroscopic process, the simulation of microstructure evolution plays a central role to optimize the properties of the material and of the components. Computations of large scale 3D microstructures coupled with multiphysical effects essentially require to comprise modern multigrid and parallel algorithms to efficiently use high performance clusters.