On the afternoon of March 2, 2018, Prof. Donald W. Hamer, Professor of Department of Material Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, was invited to visit the Department of Electrical Engineering for an academic visit and gave a lecture entitled “Understanding, Predicting and Designing Materials Microstructures and Properties Guided by Phase-field Method”. The lecture will be held at Room 205 of the High Voltage Building, chaired by Prof. He Jinliang. Prof. Dang Zhimin, associate Prof. Zhang Bo, associate Prof. Li Qi, associate Prof. Hu Jun, and more than 20 students from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Department of Materials Engineering and North China Electric Power University, attended the lecture.

Prof. Chen's report is divided into two parts. In the first part, Prof. Chen introduced the development background, basic principles and application scope of phase field simulation, and compared it with other commonly used calculation methods in material science and physics. In particular, he explained the characteristics and advantages of the phase field simulation in dealing with the structure and characteristics of materials at micro and mesoscopic scales, by comparing the interfacial diffusion theory and the electron density functional theory in the phase field method.

In the second part, Prof. Chen took two research examples to illustrate the application of phase field simulation in the calculation and prediction of polarization state of ferroelectric materials and the design of ultra-high piezoelectric ceramics. These two cases involve the physical processes of phase transition and domain formation of ferroelectric materials under electric stress, which are closely related to the frontier research of advanced dielectric materials. The computational material science, such as phase field simulation, can not only explain the mechanism of Engineering materials, but also provide guidance for the regulation of functional properties of materials, which also provides a new idea for the research of advanced electrical materials.

Profile：

Prof. Chen Longqing is a chair professor of the Donald W. Hamer, and Professor of the Engineering Materials Science, Mechanics and Mathematics in Department of Engineering Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. He held bachelor's, master's and doctor's degrees in materials science and engineering from Zhejiang University, State University of New York at Stony Brook and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) respectively. His main research fields are phase field method, multi-scale computational materials science and material design. He has published more than 500 articles, including more than 20 articles in Nature, Science and the journals of Nature. He has won many research awards and honors, including the Materials Theory Award and the Guggenheim Award of the Materials Research Society (MRS) in 20014; Humboldt Research Award of Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung; the Outstanding Scientist Award of Functional Materials Branch of American Minerals, Metals & Materials (TMS); Lee Hsun Lecture Award of Shenyang Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences; ASM International Silver Medal Award; Young Researcher Award of US office of naval research (ONR); two Special Creation Awards of the US National Science Foundation (NSF); the Distinguished Young Scholars by National Science Fund (2004); Fellow of American Society for Metals (ASM) International; Fellow of American Ceramic Society (ACerS); Fellow of American Physical Society (APS), Fellow of Materials Research Society (MRS), lifelong members of Minerals,Metals&Materials Society (TMS). He is Editor-in-chief of npj Computational Materials, a journal of the Nature Press.