Additive Manufacturing
Additive Manufacturing (AM), or 3D Printing, is emerging as a whole new manufacturing route, that can directly produce a part from a 3D digital file. It has quite a few advantages over the conventional manufacturing route, but the most strongest impact the new manufacturing brings to us is the freedom of product design and the optimization of supply chain, from an industrial perspective.
However, AM, especially metallic AM, currently has only a tiny fraction of market share, because it is quite immature for industrial production. For example, the quality of the printed part cannot be strictly controlled. Even different AM machines of the same model print differently. On the material side, the alloys currently used/tested in AM are designed for conventional route. Firstly, they may not be “printable” due to cracking, atomization issues, volatile compositions, etc. Secondly, the AM processing conditions have inherited advantages, such as extending the solubility and refining the microstructure, which haven’t been fully understood or even explored. So, one of the current pressing problems of AM is to design new alloys that are printable, and have better or comparable properties than the conventional incumbent. Our research goal is to find the right alloy composition that can satisfy those requirements using modeling and computational methods.
Computational Materials Science
From sub-atomistic scale to continuum scale, there are methods available for modeling various microstructure features.
Phase-Field Method
Phase-field as a meso-scale simulation method can be employed to study pattern formation, phase transformation, chemical reaction, cracking, corrosion, transport and diffusion phenomenon in all kinds of materials.
