The co-proposers of the project are Dr. Gammer, a group leader at ESI, and Dr. Peil, a senior scientist at Materials Center Leoben Forschung GmbH (MCL). The total budget allocated to this project is for a period of 3 years and amounts to approximately 500 000 EUR. The project is expected to start in October 2024.
The main goal of this project is to develop new tools to better understand and control the atomic structure and the fundamental deformation mechanism of metallic glasses (MGs). The combination of multi-scale simulations and advanced experiments will provide a synergistic basis for realizing the design aim of the project to develop novel tailored MGs with enhanced mechanical properties.
This ambitious project aims to provide an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms controlling the deformation of MGs and involves a strong team of two PhD students and a post-doctoral researcher (Dr. Peil from MCL). There will be intensive interaction with various colleagues at ESI, but also close collaboration with top international researchers such as Prof. Mousseau at the University of Montreal and Dr. Stukowski, managing director of OVITO GmbH.
Dr. Sopu is a junior group leader in the Digital Materials Design group at ESI since 2022. He studied materials science at the Technical University (TU) of Darmstadt, where he received his PhD in 2011. Afterwards he worked as a postdoc at ICAMS in Bochum for two years and at IFW in Dresden for another three years. He joined ESI in 2017 as a delegated scientist from TU Darmstadt, where he was leading a stand-alone DFG project. Since then, he has built a theoretical group at ESI consisting of 3 Masters and 3 PhD students, while their simulation and experimental work has been published in more than 50 manuscripts in prestigious journals. His research focuses on the computational modelling of amorphous and crystalline material behavior and associated physical processes using atomistic and mesoscopic techniques, including molecular dynamics and athermal quasi-static, transition path sampling, metadynamics and ab-initio.