Research by: Kate Edwards Figure: Nodal temperature values for a quench propagation test using the 3D Custom ANSYS Thermal Element. Quench is a failure of a superconducting magnet where the superconducting material returns to a resistive state due. This occurs when the material reaches either its critical current, magnetic field, or temperature due to large magnetic fields or defects in the magnet. Local quenches cause a chain reaction throughout the magnet, rapidly causing the entire coil to become resistive – potentially leading to fatal damages to the magnet....

  Research by: Nicolas Castrillon        A widespread use of lasers in AM is to induce a given temperature and a phase transformation in materials deposited onto a substrate. For a laser to induce a phase transformation in the material, the power intensity must be sufficiently high to induce melting and, in all cases, stay below a vaporization or burn-off temperature of the target material. Oftentimes, there is variability in the laser input power to the target zone. For a process designer, a central question is to determine the...

  Research by: Timo Schmidt More than 50% of the raw materials handled in industry appear in particulate form, which is why an optimal powder might be of interest for industry. However, it is obvious that optimal needs to be defined for each application in a different way. This research project is focused on the SLS-3D printing process, where repeatedly layers of particles are created and sapped by a laser to create the final product. A Discrete Element Method is used to analyze the behavior of the particles in...

  Research by: Chang Yoon Park Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics provides a way to approximate field derivatives with a set of unstructured points. Due to its simplicity and ease of implementation, it has gained great traction for solving problems related to free-surface fluid flows. Unfortunately, due to several drawbacks of the conventional/traditional SPH formulations, it was never a massively popular choice for solving solid mechanics problems / non-newtonian fluid flow problems. To overcome the previous difficulties researchers have been facing when using SPH for such problems, I am developing new...

  Research by: Roger Isied Picture from: A coupled discrete element-finite difference model of selective laser sintering–Rishi Ganeriwala and Tarek I. Zohdi Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) and Selective Laser Melting (SLM) are emerging as popular additive manufacturing processes due to their ability to create custom geometries in a vast range of materials such as polymers, composites, and most notably, metals. These processes work by repeatedly depositing a layer of material powder onto a print bed and utilizing a laser to either sinter or melt the layer of particles in...

  Research by: Donghoon Kim, Youngkyu Kim, David Alcantara Many surface treatment processes involve some sort of energy transfer to the treated part. This transfer can cause thermal stresses due to temperature gradients and ultimately deteriorate the treated part. To reduce the effects from energy deposition, it is necessary to monitor the state of the part which is nontrivial due to “hidden” states that cannot be monitored, such as internal temperatures and thermal stresses. The project aims to couple an IR camera reading the part’s surface temperature with thermomechanical...

  Research by: Erden Yildizdag In this study, we develop a material point method (MPM) framework to simulate additive manufacturing processes. The MPM is one of the extensions of the particle-in-cell (PIC) method which has been used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications since 1960s. The main idea behind the material point method is to take advantages of both Eulerian and Lagrangian descriptions which are two different approaches used in the field of mechanics. In material point method, continuum field is represented with a set of particles (material points)....

  Research by: Maxwell Micali While additive manufacturing and 3D printing have achieved notoriety for their abilities to manufacture complex three-dimensional parts, the state of the art is not truly three-dimensional. Rather, the process plans rely on a stack of discretized two-dimensional layers. Discretization of smooth, freeform features results in printed parts with stair-stepped surfaces, increasing the total volumetric error of the part and potentially diminishing the intended performance of functional surfaces. By performing process planning in a fully three-dimensional domain, as opposed to the 2.5D status quo, the...

  Research by: David Fernandez-Gutierrez The Ocean represents a massive energy resource that can be employed for electricity generation. This fact has led to the growing interest ocean-driven energy generation over the last decade. This research project focuses on the development of a novel particle method to simulate the flow through marine current turbines. Ultimately, the goal of the project is to evaluate the probability and potential damage of collisions on the turbine blades from solid elements dragged by currents, and to optimize design modifications to mitigate such events. The proposed numerical method arises from...

  Research by: Zeyad Zakey The use of piping systems is ubiquitous in several engineering applications, including process plants, factories, and oil refineries. Concerning the latter, it is of priority to maintain structural integrity of all systems to ensure constant operation. However, due to natural wear and tear, corrosion, or other else, piping systems may become damaged during use. In order to repair the system, it must be isolated. This entails stoppage of operation, resulting in loss of operating time and profit. The aim of this project was to...

Syd Hashemi email: sydhashemi@berkeley.edu Research description Overview Although computer simulation power has astronomically increased since the beginning of the simulation by computers, and still is increasing, machine performance is still a limiting factor. This primarily restricts the size of the system that can be simulated, for example in the case of molecular dynamics the number of particles that can be handled with the computer, and the number of timesteps that can be calculated during the simulation is part of this restriction. Besides, to capture an important phenomena in the...

  Research by: Marc Russell Micro-machining operations utilize micro-scale machine tools to carry out traditional manufacturing process (e.g. milling, drilling, etc. ) on microscale parts. They can be used for part creation as well as surfacing . Binder-less polycrystalline diamond (BPLCD) has been cited as an ideal machine tool material due to its superior mechanical properties (higher hardness, higher wear resistance, isotropic material properties, etc.) to that of the conventional diamond materials usually used for such tooling. However, because of these properties it is difficult to produce BPLCD tooling...

  Research by: Chang Yoon Park A Discrete Element Approach was used to create a framework for mechanical simulations of sintered materials. Bond stiffness between the particles were determined by performing eigenvalue analysis.
If the stored energy in the bonds exceeds the pre-determined fracture surface energy, the bonds were deactivated to simulate fracture. A 3 Point Bending test was performed as an...

Research by: Santiago Miret Ceramic Matrix Composite (CMC) materials are becoming more and more important for high temperature and high stress environments, such as those found in aerospace and automotive applications. The aim of this project is to create a design tool for CMCs using numerical methods to compute the effective properties of the materials and to simulate their behavior in high stress...

  Research by: Brett Kelly Existing additive manufacturing techniques tend to operate by printing of two-dimensional cross-sections layered on top of one another to form a three dimensional geometry. Optical printing techniques such as photopolymerization by stereolithography have the potential to move towards “true” 3D printing through the use of holographic light shaping. By controlling the phase of an incident coherent wave front there is potential to pattern light in 3 dimensions and cure non-planar geometries in a single exposure. This offers the advantages of increased print speed, the...

  Research by: Shanna Hays Additive Manufacturing (AM), more commonly known as 3D printing, is the process of building up material layers to produce a final product capable of having freeform geometries and internal structures. Most AM processes utilize polymer and plastic materials which have limited applications due to the anisotropic material response resulting from the layer-by-layer construction and generally poor fine feature resolution. One polymer based process, the material jetting process, or Multi-Jet Printing (MJP), has a potential for increased use as the technique is capable of producing...

  Research by: Donghoon Kim Although the demand for miniaturized products is increasing these days, existing manufacturing robots in serial production systems seem to have difficulties in producing miniature products because they have had to become increasingly larger to properly complete precise machining. Therefore, small-scale self-assembly could provide economic and efficient solutions to overcome this limitation. Also, the self-assembly of 3D structures at the micro scale could make it possible to fabricate new materials. The characteristics of different materials could be combined to produce advanced engineering materials including smart...

  Research by: Erden Yildizdag 3-D printing also known as additive manufacturing has an increasing demand in the industry to manufacture different kinds of devices. Thus, materials used for 3-D printing need to have different properties (electrical, magnetic, thermal, mechanical, etc.) depending on what we are manufacturing. The aim of this project is modeling new functionalized materials and look for their performances with numerical and experimental studies. Firstly, overall response of the new functionalized material is investigated using multi-scale computational homogenization techniques as numerical tool. After that, different materials...

Research by: Matthew Kurry With modern polymer and composite technology helmets used by military personnel have become so good at preventing death from kinetic impacts that soldiers are surviving attacks that would have killed them before. While more soldiers are surviving, the momentum transfer due to the impact can injure the wearer’s brain. In this research we seek to understand the momentum and energy transfer physics of open-celled foams to better protect helmet wearers. Various projects in this research include the processing of scanned foam images and the used...

Bhavesh Patel email: b.patel@berkeley.edu Research description Overview The interests of this research are particle doped composites materials, made by adding particles into a base material commonly called matrix material. The focus is on potential application for micro electromagnetic devices such as magnetic cores for planar inductor or nano composite capacitors. Based on these applications, the objective is to propose a numerical tool that allows simulating behavior of micro/nano particle doped material under an electromagnetic (EM) field. Specifically, knowing the external EM field the composite is immersed in, we want:...

Research by: Matthew Kury Underground blasts are of particular interests to civilian miners as well as military defense contractors. Soils are complicated composite of grains, fluids and other materials, which are often blown out during explosions. The complicated nature of the event requires a multi-method approach in order to capture the physics of the event and to make simulating the event possible. I am developing a parallel discrete element code to capture the behavior of the soil near the blast event and a finite element code to represent the...

Research by: Aashish Ahuja Lighting consumes a substantial amount of energy in buildings that has made it imperative to depend more on daylighting.                                                    My research tries to computationally assess the qualities of a novel light-channeling facade subsystem called ‘Translucent Concrete’ (TC).   I conduct various simulations on my model, starting with: 1) Ray Tracing to estimate the performance of the TC system during the day.  ...

  Research by: John Stevens I build computational models to predict the net fuel energy harvest by and light transmission through multiphase wireless photoelectrochemical systems that use optical concentration. With these models, I assess optimal designs to accommodate different solar tracking methodologies, photovoltaic cells, catalysts, deployment locations, optical concentration ratios and cell geometries. This allows me to propose designs to reduce energy costs, primary energy inputs and efficiency losses, while enhancing device lifetime. Additionally, I use computational models and experimental processes to study the effects of heat transfer on...

Research by: Peter Minor To protect against high temperatures, gas turbines use highly porous ceramic thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) which are susceptible to erosion and foreign object impact damage. Few numerical tools exist which are capable of both accurately capturing the specific failure mechanisms inherent to TBCs and iterating design parameters without the requirement for coupled experimental data. To overcome these limitations, I’m developing a discrete element model (DEM) to simulate the microstructure of a TBC using a large-scale assembly of bonded particles. The particles can be combined to...

Research by: Rishi Ganeriwala Additive manufacturing refers to a relatively recent group of manufacturing technologies whereby one can “3D print” parts, which has the potential to significantly reduce waste and alter the entire industry. Selective laser sintering/ melting (SLS/ SLM) is one type of additive manufacturing technology with the distinct advantage of being able to 3D print metals. In SLS/ SLM parts are built up layer-by-layer out of powder particles, which are selectively melted via a laser. However, in order to produce defect free parts of sufficient strength, the...

Flowing particulate media are ubiquitous in a wide spectrum of applications that include transport systems, fluidized beds, manufacturing and materials processing technologies, energy conversion and propulsion technologies, sprays, jets, slurry flows, and biological...