Title:	3D phase-field modeling of phase transformations in materials
DNr:	SNIC 2014/1-232
Project Type:	SNIC Medium Compute
Principal Investigator:	Annika Borgenstam <annbor@kth.se>
Affiliation:	Kungliga Tekniska högskolan
Duration:	2014-07-30 – 2015-08-01
Classification:	20506
Keywords:

Abstract

Martensite, a hard phase, forms during thermo-mechanical treatment of steels and other materials such as Zr-alloys, U-Nb alloys, imparts excellent mechanical properties to such materials. Hence understanding the martensite formation is of great importance from both fundamental as well as applied points of view. However, the formation of martensite is very rapid, approximately 1100m/s, which makes it very difficult to be studied by in-situ measurements. Thus it is essential to model the martensitic transformation (MT) under various thermo-mechanical conditions. Phase-field (PF) modeling is primarily used to simulate phase transformations and solidification phenomena in the area of materials science and has also been successfully used to simulate MT. Phase-field method is a mathematical model that minimizes the Gibbs energy of a system using Time Dependent Ginzburg Landau equation and yields the microstructure evolution. In the present work phase-field simulations of MT are performed by using Finite element method (FEM). The simulation results on steels so far clearly show morphological mirror image formation, which is one of the typical characteristics of martensitic microstructure. The results have showed rather good correlation with the experimental results. In future several 3D simulations will be performed under different thermo-mechanical conditions in order to acquire an in-depth knowledge about MT in steels, Zr, Ti, Pu as well as in U, which could be extremely helpful for the material industries as well as to the academia.