Markus Stricker is honoured with an ERC Starting Grant.
© RUB, Marquard

ERC Grant Understanding Dislocations Networks in Metals

Dislocations have a major impact on the properties of metals. Markus Stricker is trying to get to the bottom of them using simulations.

The way metals behave when plastically deformed depends heavily on how defects in the crystal lattice interact with each other. Professor Markus Stricker from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, understands these so-called dislocations as networks and intends to analyze their behaviour using simulations. He’s been awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council ERC for this project. Starting in September 2024, “DISCO-DATA: Hard work, plastic flow: a data-centric approach to dislocation-based plasticity” will be funded for five years with 1.5 million euros.

Why less stress than expected is needed to deform a metal

Almost all the things we interact with daily contain metal components, and most of them have been manufactured into their final shape by plastic deformation. Industrial forming for the production of these objects is largely based on empirical values, such as how much stress is required to form a product from certain components and to a certain thickness. “Almost 100 years ago, we realized that the theoretical stress required for this purpose – i.e. force per surface area – was 100 to 1,000 times greater than the actual stress required,” says Markus Stricker. “This is due to defects in the crystal lattice of the metals that occur in lines, so-called dislocations.”

These dislocations are already well understood at the atomistic scale. On a larger scale, however, they interact in a complex way. For example, the interaction between dislocations is partly to blame for the fact that a metal becomes increasingly difficult to deform further with increasing deformation – an effect known as work hardening. “Previous models that attempt to describe this behavior don’t work very well yet,” says Markus Stricker. “Basically, the dislocation behavior underlying these effects is not really understood yet.”

He wants to use his ERC grant to investigate the interaction of dislocations for the first time by simulating them and explicitly representing them as networks using mathematical methods from graph theory. Using many simulations of different networks, he plans to create abstract networks and analyze their behavior during deformation. In the final step, he will then go back to the physical model.

About the person

Markus Stricker studied mechanical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe between 2006 and 2012, where he obtained his doctorate at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2017. He initially remained at KIT as a postdoctoral researcher until 2018 and then moved to the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. Since 2020, he holds the junior professorship in Materials Informatics and Data Science at the Interdisciplinary Center for Advanced Materials Simulation (ICAMS) at Ruhr University Bochum.

Press contact

Prof. Dr. Markus Stricker
Materials Informatics and Data Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Advanced Materials Simulation ICAMS
Ruhr University Bochum
Germany
Phone: +49 234 32 29377
Email: markus.stricker@ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Website of the research group

Download high-resolution images
The selected images are downloaded as a ZIP file. The captions and image credits are available in the HTML file after unzipping.
Conditions of use
The images are free to use for members of the press, provided the relevant copyright notice is included. The images may be used solely for press coverage of Ruhr-Universität Bochum that relates solely to the contents of the article that includes the link for the image download. By downloading the images, you receive a simple right of use for one-time reporting. Saving the images for other purposes or further processing of the images that goes beyond adapting them to the respective layout requires an extended right of use. Should you therefore wish to use the photos in any other way, please contact redaktion@ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Published

Thursday
05 September 2024
12:15 pm

By

Meike Drießen (md)

Translated by

Donata Zuber

Share