Materials Modeling

Notes of modeling materials; from first principals, on.

Lecture 1: Introduction to Material Science

Ashby Chart sourced from ntopologyarrow-up-right

Multiscale Modeling is touched on in Fluid Mechanics but here, will traverse the scale through the lectures.

Ab Inito Methods derive materials properties from first principals or wave equation

  • Pros

    • electronic and structural behavior and properties

    • bond breaking and formation in chemical reaction

    • can systematically improve results to prove quality

    • in principal, can obtain exact properties

  • Cons

    • very small systems, ~O(10E2) atoms

    • very small timescales, ~O(10E-12) or pico seconds

    • numerically expensive on even super computers of ~O(10E15) flops

Atomistic Methods is the range of semi classical statistical mechanics for thermodynamic and transport properties

  • Pros

    • Systems larger on scale of ~O(10E4) and ~O(10E6) atoms

    • Larger timescales of ~O(10E-9) to O(10E-6) second

  • Cons

    • results depend on force field used

    • Transport properties dependent on macroscale conditions which affect physical processes

Mesoscale methods is a level of simplification treating clusters of atoms as blobs of matter. An abstraction which allows for some computational savings by calculation as entities moving through a potential field.

  • Pros

    • Study structural features of complex systems on size ~O(10E8) or more

    • Dynamic processes on the order of a second

  • Cons

    • Mostly only qualitative tendencies, with quality difficult to ascertain

    • Approximations limit insight

Continuum Methods: assume matter can be treated as field quantity which changes continuously. Solve balance equations, per FEM and CFD.

  • Pro: rest of the time lengthscale diagram is accessible

  • Con Require viscosity, diffusion coefficients, and other transport properties

Upscaling is the using a lower lengthscale information to inform the properties of higher length scales in a deductive approach

Downscaling is using higher scale, often experimental information, to inform lower order parameters. More difficult due to non-uniqueness.

Lecture 2: Ab Inito Principals, Fundamentals

Lecture 3: Ab Inito and Density Functional Theory, Part 1

Lecture 4: Ab Inito and DFT, Part 2

Lecture 5: Linux

Lecture 6: Ab Inito and DFT, Part 3

Lecture 7: Molecular Dynamics (MD), Introduction

Lecture 8: MD Introduction to Integrators

Lecture 9: MD Force Fields and Ensembles

Lecture 10: MD Static Properties

Lecture 11: MD Dynamic Properties

Lecture 12: MD Tricks of the Trade

Lecture 13: Project Guidelines

Lecture 14: Introduction to Monte Carlo Methods

Lecture 15: Ising Model

Lecture 16: Kinetic and Reverse Monte Carlo

Lecture 17: Brownian Dynamics

Lecture 18: Dissipative Particle Dynamics

Lecture 19: Continuum Methods and Beyond

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