Abstract

Metastability, Phase Transformation, and Microstructure in Structural Phase Transformations

Mitchell Luskin
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Martensitic crystals undergo a structural
(shape) first order phase transformation between a
high symmetry crystalline phase and
several variants of a low symmetry crystalline phase
(such as the cubic to monoclinic transformation in some CuAlNi alloys). These crystals are observed to be in metastable states exhibiting a fine-scale spatial oscillation between the variants of the low symmetry phase, and hysteresis is observed as the temperature or boundary forces are varied. We will present computational methods and a numerical analysis for this microstructure, and we will discuss several multiscale methods and the different metastable states that they compute. Joint work with Pavel Belik and Bo Li.