Blog posts

In the present work, we study morphologies arising due to competing substrate interaction, electric field, and confinement effects on a symmetric diblock copolymer. We employ a coarse-grained nonlocal Cahn-Hilliard phenomenological model taking into account the appropriate contributions of substrate interaction and electrostatic field. The proposed model couples the Ohta-Kawasaki functional with Maxwell equation of electrostatics, thus alleviating the need for any approximate solution used in previous studies.

W. Gregory Sawyer, University of Florida, USA will be the Plenary Speaker at ICoBT2016

Keynote Speakers include:
Dan Bader, University of Southampton, UK
David L. Burris, University of Delaware, USA
Simon Johnson, Unilever, UK
Mark Rainforth, University of Sheffield, UK
Feng Zhou, Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics, China

The post is funded through a recently awarded four year European H2020 research project SINTBAT (Silicon based materials and new processing technologies for improved lithium-ion batteries), and coordinated by VARTA.

Atomistic simulations have now become commonplace in the study of the deformation and failure of materials. Increase in computing power in recent years has made large-scale simulations with billions, or even trillions, of atoms a possibility. Nevertheless, most simulations to-date, are still performed with quasi-2D geometries or rather simplistic 3D setups. Although controlled studies on such well-defined structures are often required to obtain quantitative information from atomistic simulations, for qualitative studies focusing on e.g. the identification of mechanisms, researchers would greatly benefit from a methodology that helps realize more realistic configurations. The ideal scenario would be a one-on-one reconstruction of experimentally observed structures. NanoSCULPT allows you to do precisely this for both crystalline and amorphous structures.

I am currently looking to fill an open PhD position in a project titled:

Advanced Virtual Design of 3D Printed Fusion Reactor Components

This is to continue recent work that uses X-ray tomography, high performance computing and finite element analysis to design the plasma facing wall of the ITER reactor. Recent related publications can be found below:

We formulate a geometric theory of nonlinear morphoelastic shells that can model the time evolution of residual stresses induced by bulk growth. We consider a thin body and idealize it by a representative orientable surface. In this geometric theory, bulk growth is modeled using an evolving referential configuration for the shell (material manifold). We consider the evolution of both the first and second fundamental forms in the material manifold by considering them as dynamical variables in the variational problem.