Computational Materials Science: An Underpinning for Engineering Science

Thursday, March 2, 2006 - 5:00 p.m. to Friday, March 3, 2006 - 5:55 p.m.

CEE Structures Seminar 

Featuring:
Dr. H. Eliot Fang,
Manager, Computational Materials Science & Engineering Department
Sandia National Laboratories

Location: EG E3161
Open and free to the public

Abstract:

For many years, material scientists, chemists and physicists have longed to have computer simulations that predict the behavior of materials and track the evolution of their microstructures from the atomic to the engineering scales.  With the staggering advances in computer speed and the continued improvements in numerical techniques in recent years, computational materials science has become a powerful and, in many cases, a predictive tool.  As the field of computational materials science develops and matures, the notion that modeling efforts should be an integral part of interdisciplinary materials research and must include experimental validation is taking hold in the community.

At Sandia National Laboratories, scientists develop computational models to predict the performance and behavior of complex materials, such as metals, ceramics, and polymers, across all relevant length and time scales.  Promising progresses have been made in modeling material structures at interfaces and in bulk, simulating microstructural evolution during processing and predicting the property degradation during service and aging.  However, significant challenges in theory and numerical algorithm developments still remain to be overcome.

In this presentation, recent efforts of materials modeling and simulation at Sandia to support national security and industry applications will be reviewed, highlighting their successes and challenges.  General issues existing in the computational modeling community will be discussed.  Lessons learned from bridging physics at different length scales and coupling different simulation codes be shared.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Eliot Fang is the manager of the Computational Materials Science & Engineering Department at Sandia National Laboratories and a Fellow of ASME.  He received his B.S. degree from the National Central University in Taiwan and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Santa Barbara, all in mechanical engineering.  Dr. Fang’s research focuses on applying multiscale material models and high performance computing to elucidate mechanisms of material behaviors, and to predict material properties at various length scales and in different environments.  He has over 60 publications reporting his research accomplishments.  Dr. Fang is a recipient of the 2006 Asian American Engineer of the Year Award.  He is also a program manager in the Advanced Scientific Computing (ASC) Program at Sandia.