At the invitation of Prof. Xuejun Jin, Prof. Long-Qing Chen from Penn State University visited SJTU on Jun 9, 2013, and gave a presentation to all students and faculties at room 313 material building A. The topic of the presentation was “Introduction to Phase-field Model of Microstructure Evolution”.
 
Abstract:
Many important engineering materials are designed by controlling their phase transformations and microstructure evolution. Examples include the improvement of mechanical properties through solid state precipitation reactions in Ni-based superalloys and age-hardened Al-alloys, the useful dielectric properties and electro-mechanical coupling effects by manipulating the phase transitions in ferroelectric crystals, and the memory effect of shape-memory alloys by utilizing martensitic transformations. Phase-field method has recently become as the method of choice for modeling three-dimensional microstructure evolution for a wide variety of materials processes. In this presentation, a brief overview of the phase-field approach and its applications will be provided. Recent effort on integrating the phase-field approach with other computational methods such as first-principles calculations will be discussed. A number of examples of coupling phase-field simulations and experimental measurements will be presented. It will be demonstrated that one can use the phase-field method to help interpreting experimental observations as well as provide guidance to achieve desirable transition temperatures and specific microstructures. The possibility to directly compute the evolution of effective mechanical and transport properties will also be discussed.
 
P.S: Prof. Long-Qing Chen’s google scholar and group home page
http://scholar.google.com.hk/citations?user=t9JiWaAAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
http://www.ems.psu.edu/~chen/