Long-Qing Chen
Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Materials Research Institute, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
Materials research is largely concerned with the study and manipulation of the spatial and temporal evolution of structural, magnetic, electric polarization, charge, and chemical domains in a material as well as their responses to changes in environmental conditions during processing and in service. This presentation will give a brief introduction to the phase-field method for modeling and predicting hierarchical materials microstructures and properties and their evolution under different mechanical and electric stimuli. Phase-field method describes a mesoscale microstructure through a set of continuum fields such as the spatial distributions of atomic density, chemical composition, long-range atomic order, crystallinity, ferroic order, defects, etc. It can handle complex microstructures and takes into account the interfacial and defect energies as well as the long-range electrostatic, magnetic, and elastic interactions within a mesoscale microstructure. It has been successfully applied to modeling and predicting mesoscale microstructure evolution during ferroic phase transitions and domain formation, solidification, grain growth, particle coarsening, electrochemical processes, and plastic deformation. The emphasis of this presentation will be on utilizing the phase-field method to help interpreting experimental observations as well as to provide guidance to achieve desirable mesoscale microstructures and thus properties in functional and information technology materials. The presentation will also outline a number of potential new applications of the phase-field method, including modeling the electronic and structural phase transitions in strongly correlated electron systems, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth morphology of two-dimensional materials, additive manufacturing, and the mesoscale structure evolution of a crystal under ultrafast stimuli.