Description:

The phase-field approach has been applied to modeling many microstructure evolution processes such as morphological evolution of precipitate microstructures in alloys, dendrite growth during solidification, grain growth, and domain structure formation during ferroic phase transitions. In this talk, a short overview of the phase-field approach will be provided, and a number of recent examples of applying phase-field approach to modeling solid-state phase transformations and microstructure evolution will be presented. Recent effort on integrating the phase-field approach with other computational methods such as first-principles calculations and CALPHAD will be discussed. The applications of such an integrated approach to modeling the precipitate microstructure evolution in Ni-base superalloys and Al-alloys will be demonstrated.

Biography:

Prof. Long-Qing Chen is currently a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. He received his B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University in China in 1982, a M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1985, and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT in 1990. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University from January 1990 to April 1992. Prof. Chen joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State as an assistant professor in May 1992. He was promoted to associate professor and granted tenure in July 1998, and promoted to professor in July 2002. Prof. Chens main research interest is in developing computational models for predicting microstructure evolution in advanced engineering materials. For the last decade, his group at Penn State has developed a series of phase-field models for various materials processes including grain growth, coherent precipitation, ferroelectric domain formation, particle coarsening, domain structure evolution in thin films, phase transformation in the presence of structural defects, and microstructure evolution in systems with strong elastic inhomogeneity. Prof. Chen is the author or co-author of about 200 published or accepted papers. He is the primary editor or co-editor of 3 books on computational microstructure evolution. Prof. Chen has given more than 100 invited presentations at national and international conferences as well as various institutions. He received the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in 1995 and the special research creativity award from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1999. Prof. Chen was honored by the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences the Wilson Award for Excellence in Research in 2000, and he was awarded the Penn State University Faculty Scholar Medal in Engineering in 2003. More recently, he was named an Outstanding Overseas Young Scholar by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (2004), a Changjiang Professorship at the Beijing University of Science and Technology in 2005, a Guggenheim Fellow for 2005-2006, and a Royal Society Kan Tong Po Visiting Professorship for 2005-2006.