EngD on Software development for advanced synthetic microstructure generation

The post-master Engineering Doctorate (EngD) program DEES is a two-year salaried program in the field of technological design in Electrical Engineering. The program leads to an Engineering Doctorate degree.

EngD project

Polycrystalline microstructures are widely used for their great tuneability of the material properties. A clear example is the great variation in steel grades, each with a different combination of ductility, strength, etc. These properties result from the underlying complex polycrystalline microstructure. Simulation of artificially generated, 3D synthetic microstructures supports the design of novel steel grades. However, generating these synthetic microstructures is far from trivial. Significant challenges come from the requirements that the crystals should have realistic shapes, their sizes should match a particular grain size distribution, and in multiphase microstructures the volume fractions and morphology of the phases should be controllable.

Project goal

The main objective of the EngD project is to design and implement a software tool which is capable of generating advanced polycrystal geometries in support of the development of novel steel grades. Building on earlier work done at Tata Steel, an advanced multilevel Voronoi tessellation approach will be followed. The existing method (in Visual Basic) is to be re-implemented in Python and extended. The software should be modular, have a graphical as well as a scripting interface and should be extendable, so that it may serve as a platform for further development. As a validation, ensembles of synthetic microstructures mimicking real materials will be generated, which will then be compared on a statistical basis with the real microstructures.