Until October 2010, I worked at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), where I defended my PhD thesis on the numerical modeling and simulation of grain growth.

Numerical modeling and simulation of grain growth

The microstructure of materials is often composed of multiple grains with different crystallographic orientations. Under certain conditions, the larger grains start to grow and the smaller grains shrink, increasing the mean grain size. Insight into this phenomenon, called grain growth, and its parameters is of great technological importance, since tailored grain size is often required to obtain materials with specific properties. Computer simulations are a practical tool in this study.

Phase field modelling is a versatile tool for simulating microstructural evolution phenomena. One type of phase field models is studied at the department of Metallurgy and Materials Engineering of the K.U.Leuven. Unfortunately, realistic three-dimensional grain growth simulations with these models demand significant amounts of computation power. The goal of my research was therefore to develop efficient methods to perform these simulations. My research work involved partial differential equations, parallel computing, search for efficient algorithms, simulation and finding new materials science results through dedicated data analysis.

This research was conducted in collaboration with Nele Moelans, Stefan Vandewalle and Bart Blanpain.

Selected publications

Articles in internationally reviewed journals

• V. Yadav, L. Vanherpe, N. Moelans, Effect of volume fractions on microstructure evolution in isotropic volume-conserved two-phase alloys: A phase-field study, Computational Materials Science, 125:297-308, 2016
• L. Vanherpe, N. Moelans, B. Blanpain, and S. Vandewalle, Bounding box framework for efficient phase field simulation of grain growth in anisotropic systems, Computational Materials Science, 50(7):2221-2231, 2011, Published online: April, 2011
• L. Vanherpe, N. Moelans, B. Blanpain, and S. Vandewalle, Pinning effect of spheroid second-phase particles on grain growth studied by three-dimensional phase field simulations, Computational Materials Science, 49(2):340-350, 2010, Published online: June, 2010
  as Report TW 555, December, 2009
• L. Vanherpe, F. Wendler, B. Nestler, and S. Vandewalle, A multigrid solver for phase field simulation of microstructure evolution, Mathematics and Computers in Simulation, 80(7):1438-1448, 2010, Published online: December, 2009
  as Report TW 542, July, 2009
• L. Vanherpe, N. Moelans, B. Blanpain, and S. Vandewalle, Three-dimensional phase field simulations of grain growth in materials containing finely dispersed second-phase particles, PAMM, 7(1):2020001-2020002, Special Issue: Sixth International Congress on Industrial Applied Mathematics (ICIAM07) and GAMM Annual Meeting, Zürich 2007, Published online: February, 2008
• L. Vanherpe, N. Moelans, B. Blanpain, and S. Vandewalle, Bounding box algorithm for three-dimensional phase field simulations of microstructural evolution in polycrystalline materials, Physical Review E, 76(5):056702 (11 pages), November, 2007
  as Report TW 494, May, 2007

Publications in international conference proceedings

• N. Moelans, L. Vanherpe, J. Heulens, B. Rodiers, B. Blanpain, P. Wollants, S. Vandewalle, Quantitative phase-field modeling of microstructure evolution in multi-component and multi-phase alloys, Supplemental proceedings, Vol 2: Materials Characterization, Computation, Modeling and Energy, TMS 2010, Hume-Rothery Symposium: Configurational Thermodynamics of Materials, 399-410, February 2010
• N. Moelans, A. Serbruyns, J. Heulens, B. Blanpain, P. Wollants, L. Vanherpe, S. Vandewalle and B. Rodiers, Quantitative phase-field simulations of coarsening and growth in complex systems, Discovery and Optimization of Materials through Computational Design, MS&T '08, 494-505, 2008