Materials Research

Materials research is being performed under the direction of David McDowell of Mechanical Engineering.

Simulations of heterogeneous material structure, often at the scale of microstructure or mesoscopic scales, are essential to constructing the next generation of constitutive laws for material deformation and damage. Such finite element, boundary element or finite difference simulations are key to understanding the physical processes, underlying structure-property relations, and the statistical components of behavior relevant to engineering applications and materials processing. The need for improved parallel computing algorithms in these high degree-of-freedom simulations of material behavior, often involving nonlinear material behavior and kinematics, is apparent.

This work emphasizes fundamental issues in modeling of material behavior:

• Effects of material inhomogeneity (phase distribution, phase morphology, thermal and mechanical coupling among phases and interphase boundaries, grain boundaries, defect distribution, diffusion paths, phase transformations, etc.) on deformation and failure processes of materials, taking account of realistic microstructures and stochastic aspects associated with heterogeneity.
• Development of new computational/mechanics approaches for incorporating outcomes of computational studies into the development of continuum models for dissipative processes of evolving material structure.
• By virtue of the nonlinear nature of the governing equations of the materials of interest, only relatively small 2-D problems can be addressed in a conventional uniprocessor environment. More realistic scales and 3-D finite element calculations are more effectively carried out in a parallel computing environment due to their large size and the required CPU time. As a result, there is a strong incentive to pursue structuring computer codes for efficient parallel processing.