The research objective of the group "Precipitation and Kinetics" is to provide accurate theoretical description on the time- and temperature-evolution of microstructure and phase transformations in structural materials, with the main focus on alloys and steels.
Combining state-of-the-art quantum-mechanical methods with those of modern thermodynamics and statistical physics, we would like to examine metallurgical trends in phase stability and elastic properties of selected materials.
Our aim is to provide theoretical insight into the nature of atomic-scale defects in solid materials and how they modify the materials' properties. We employ ab-initio electronic-structure methods (mainly density-functional theory) to relate the atomic structure of a defect to its chemical and spectroscopic behavior. We also actively work on developing and improving our methods and models.
The research in this group is focussed on the investigation of phase diagrams of metals, its (meta)stable thermodynamic phases and the transitions between them. In particular, an expertise in the ab initio determination of vibrational and magnetic contributtions to the free energy is developed and used.
The microstructure group has the objective to identify and quantify the atomic scale mechanisms and structures which eventually determine the formation and evolution of the microstructure and thus the mechanical and/or electronic properties of a material.
The CM Computer Center Group provides the CM department with a powerful compute grid and a user-friendly PC environment. Therefore we combined various new techniques such as water-cooling, object-oriented administration approaches, automatic component monitoring with self-healing as well as an unattended remote installation of all compute nodes and working PCs.
