The properties of our materials depend very strongly on their microstructure, which usually forms during solidification from their melt. The details of this process is therefore of high theoretical and practical interest. Eutectic and peritectic materials exhibit a rich variety of complex self-organizing solidification morphologies, which form by the competitive growth of the solid phases. This process is, however, much less studied in peritectic systems than in eutectic ones.

The subject of the PhD work is the numerical investigation of the microstructure formation in these multi-phase materials, including the steady-state growth forms, their stability domains, instabilities and the transients. For these studies the phase-field method will be used, which is a well-established technique for modeling microstructure formation during solidification. The work will involve the use and further development of our high-performance simulation code that we run on GPUs and the evaluation of the simulaiton results. These numerical studies will be strongly linked to the directional solidification experiments performed on a transparent peritectic alloy by our colleagues at the University of Leoben, Austria. We submitted a bilateral Austrian-Hungarian proposal together to support this work.