Materials modelling research in VTT

This survey was conducted to review present activities at VTT related to materials modelling, used techniques, HW and SW tools as well as problems and visions of the modellers. The results show that materials modelling is actively used at VTT, the materials and phenomena are various and the modelling tasks usually challenging with several phases, phase changes and several size scales. Material degradation and surface/interface phenomena are the most common to model, but also fracture, moisture/heat transfer and thermodynamics are common modelling tasks. The largest material group is metals, but coatings, ceramics, biomaterials polymers, composites, bentonite and ice are also modelled extensively. The largest modelling categories are material performance and properties. The most used hardware is PC. Linux clusters are used for heavier calculating jobs. The most used commercial software are Matlab, ABAQUS and COMSOL Multiphysics. FactSage and HSC are used in thermodynamics. Several different open source programs are used. VTT researchers also develop subroutines for commercial programs and open source codes. Experimental validation is a general rule at VTT and validation is done at small, medium and full scale. The full scale validation is less common due to large time, size scale or lack of resources.