This paper was produced for the 2019 NAFEMS World Congress in Quebec Canada

Resource Abstract

The article summarizes current methods and trends aiming towards “engineering the material” and their integration into a holistic framework. The engineered entities for a materials scientists and engineers are microstructure-related features like e.g. grain size, texture, dislocation density, segregation patterns, phase fractions, morphologies to name a few.



The FEM community, in contrast, typically focuses on “engineering with materials” and is interested in a number of parameters characterizing the properties of a material essentially without considering any influences of the materials microstructure. Examples are yield strength, flow curves, isotropic and anisotropic elastic properties, transport properties like thermal diffusion, thermo-mechanical properties and many more.



There is an increasing interest in improving and combining simulations at the component scale and in eventually including different local materials properties at different positions in the component. A potential path for the determination and inclusion of such local materials properties is based on an HDF5 type description of materials allowing both a statistical and a spatially resolved description of microstructure data.



Examples of workflows will be presented simulating the evolution of microstructures during a process sequence involving casting, heat treatment, joining and eventually operational load. Homogenization methods and virtual materials testing of the simulated microstructures allow e.g. for the determination of anisotropic flow curves, of anisotropic thermal expansion behaviour and other properties. A prerequisite for the determination of the properties of polycrystalline multiphase technical materials is the knowledge of the properties of the individual phases, which in future may be calculated from discrete electronic/atomistic and mesoscopic models.