Chair for Materials Science and Engineering
Institute for Materials • Faculty of Mechanical Engineering
Microstructure Informatics
After Oliver Kastner had left our group in 2010, there were a few years where we did not have a group that concentrated on modeling and on numerical methods; instead we co-operated with scientists from ICAMS. Toward the end of the reporting period, we formed a new focused research group in this area. It is headed by Pascal Thome. In his doctoral thesis, he worked on the assessment and evaluation of EBSD patterns in orientation imaging scanning electron microscopy. As a member of Victoria Yardley’s group, he studied the relations between martensite microstructures and the parent austenite state. For this work, he obtained two best-poster awards at international conferences. Later, in the framework of SFB/TR 103, he developed a new high-resolution EBSD method, which allows the resolution of angular misorientations < 0.1°. This rotation vector base line EBSD method was used to characterize the small misorientations between dendrites in directionally solidified Ni-base superalloys. The method was published in 2019 in Ultramicroscopy, and Pascal Thome presented it at the TMS meeting in San Diego in 2020. Pascal Thome also works on the use of machine learning for recognizing and evaluating complex microstructures.
These topics will be pursued in the new microstructure informatics group. Presently, this group consists of Pascal Thome and Alexander Richter as a graduate student. The objective is to develop new methods that allow for automatically evaluating and interpreting complex microstructures. The group will have access to an upgraded computer lab and provide access to advanced software tools for users.
