University of Iowa:

Principal Investigator: C. Beckermann
Post-doctoral Researchers: Richard Hardin, Qiao Li
Graduate Students: Yili Lu, Dan Ceynar,...

Co-Investigators:

I. Steinbach (Access, Aachen, Germany), A. Karma (NEU), H.C. deGroh III (Nasa Glenn)

This is a NASA-sponsored project to define a microgravity flight experiment in materials science. Please look at the NASA Space Research home page to learn more about such experiments. This page is also a good place to look research announcements, task books, etc. We plan to have more detailed information on this project in the near future. For now, the following overview is provided:

Objectives:

The objectives of the research are to determine the microstructural evolution of and thermal interactions between several equiaxed crystals growing dendritically in an undercooled melt of a pure substance, and to use this benchmark data to test and develop equiaxed dendritic solidification models.

Significance and Background:

The research will establish a more firm scientific basis for the modeling and simulation of microstructure evolution in metal casting processes in order to optimize material properties. The planned experiment extends previous microgravity experiments on the growth of a single, isolated dendrite tip (i.e., the IDGE experiment of Prof. Glicksman at RPI) to multiple crystals and transient growth - a situation more close to actual casting conditions. 

Some pictures of mesoscopic simulations (by co-I I.Steinbach):