Understanding the physical processes during fabrication and annealing of ceramic materials is a long sought goal among material scientists. Using strontium titanate as a model system for perovskite ceramics, the present work combines advanced non-destructive 3D characterization techniques and computational modeling of microstructure evolution in order to link grain morphology, interface anisotropy and microstructure evolution to macroscopic physical properties .

Understanding the physical processes during fabrication and annealing of ceramic materials is a long sought goal among material scientists. Using strontium titanate as a model system for perovskite ceramics, the present work combines advanced non-destructive 3D characterization techniques and computational modeling of microstructure evolution in order to link grain morphology, interface anisotropy and microstructure evolution to macroscopic physical properties . This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

This book summarizes the found insights of grain growth behavior, of multidimensional decomposition for regular grids to efficiently parallelize computing and how to simulate recrystallization by coupling the finite element method with the phase-field method for microstructure texture analysis. The frame of the book is created by the phase-field method, which is the tool used in this work, to investigate microstructure phenomena.

This book investigates the fatigue mechanisms and crack initiation of Ni, Al and Cu on a small-scale in the Very High Cycle Fatigue regime by means of innovative fatigue experimentation. A novel custom-built resonant fatigue setup showed that the sample resonant frequency changes with increasing cycle number due to fatigue damage. Mechanisms such as slip band formation have been observed. Cyclic hardening, vacancy and oxidation formation may be considered as early fatigue mechanisms.

With the advent of high performance computing, the application areas of the phase-field method, traditionally used to numerically model the phase transformation in metals and alloys, have now spanned into geoscience. A systematic investigation of the two distinct scientific problems in consideration suggest a strong influence of interfacial energy on the natural and induced pattern formation in diffusion-controlled regime.

Recent studies of deformation mechanisms of metals and alloys pioneer the better investigation of the friction and wear behavior of materials with well-defined initial microstructures. Within this scope, in this work, the effect of sub-surface deformations on the resulting friction and wear behavior has been searched by means of a systematic experimental study on Au-Ni metallic multilayer model alloy system.

This work furthers the overall understanding of a 3w-measurement, by considering previously unexamined macroscopic influence factors within measurement by Finite Element simulations (FES). Moreover, new measuring configurations are developed to determine (an)isotropic thermal conductivities of nanoscale samples. Since no analytic solutions are available for these configurations, a new evaluation methodology is presented to determine emergent thermal conductivities by FES and Neural Networks.