....about MICRESS®
 
 

The properties of almost any material are largely determined by its structure and especially by its microstructure.

MICRESS® - the MICRostructure Evolution Simulation Software - is a software enabling the calculation of microstructure formation in time and space during phase transformations, especially in metallurgical systems. The software is based on the multiphase-field concept, which has been developed by ACCESS scientists since 1995. It is maintained and distributed by ACCESS e.V. , a non-profit research center at the Aachen University of Technology (RWTH). The revenues of MICRESS® sales are re-invested into further development of the code.

The evolution of a microstructure is essentially governed by thermodynamic equilibria, diffusion and curvature. The strength of the MICRESS® code is that these aspects are treated simultaneously:

phase_diagram

 

phase-diagram
(energy scale)

diffusion

diffusion
(time scale)

curvature

 

curvature
(length scale)



ternary_eutectic

microstructure

MICRESS® applies a multiphase field method for multicomponent alloys and enables the treatment of multiphase, multigrain and multicomponent problems in the fields of solidification, grain growth, recrystallization or solid state phase transformations. All these phenomena can be addressed using this versatile and general tool. In the case of multicomponent alloys, the required thermodynamic data can either be provided in the form of locally linearized phase diagrams, or by direct coupling to thermodynamic data sets via a special TQ interface being developed in collaboration with Thermo-Calc AB, Stockholm. 

The software covers phase evolution, solutal and thermal diffusion and transformation strain in solid state. 2D and 3D simulations are possible and the size of the simulation domain, the number of grains, phases and components are chiefly restricted by available memory size and CPU speed. 

Coupling to stress/strain fields has been implemented into MICRESS® since version 5.2 alongside routines for the treatment of multicomponent diffusion and coupling to diffusion databases. 64 bit versions of MICRESS® are available from version 6.0 being released in October 2011.