Future Liquid Metal Engineering Hub
Project Funder: Engineering and Physical Science Research Council
Project lead and collaborators: This EPSRC Manufacturing Hub is led by Professor Zhongyun Fan at Brunel University London and involves collaborators from Leeds (Professors Peter Jimack and Andrew Mullis) and 3 other UK Universities (Imperial, Manchester and Oxford).
Research Theme: Microflows and Heat Transfer
Summary of project
The mission of the Hub is to be an international leader in liquid metal engineering, involving fundamental and applied research from nucleation centred solidification science through to sustainable metal processing technologies. The long-term vision is to support “full metal circulation”, in which the global demand for metallic materials is met through the full circulation of secondary metals, with minimal addition of primary metals each year.
The primary contribution to this project from the University of Leeds is through our computational modelling expertise, particularly using phase-field models. These techniques have proven to be one of the most successful approaches to have emerged over the last 25 years for the simulation of the evolution of microstructures during solidification, and in this project we are developing new ways to apply phase-field models to the simulation of realistic solidification morphologies for real alloys and inter-metallic compounds. The computational complexity of these simulations requires us to make use of state-of-the-art algorithms, implemented in our own in-house software, for parallel, adaptive and multilevel numerical techniques.
Relevant links
Snapshot of a three-dimensional dendrite formed during a rapid solidification simulation.