February 20, 2005
Computational Group to Join New MURI Effort. Our group will join other academic and DoD researchers in a new MURI effort aimed at understanding the shock sensitivity of energetic materials. Our team includes Prof. Don Thompson at the University of Missouri (who is the lead on this effort) and Prof. Steve Stuart of Clemson University. Also involved in the MURI topic are Prof. William Goddard of Cal Tech., Prof. Priya Vashishta of the University of Southern California, and Prof. Dana Dlott of the University of Illinois.  When this new effort begins in a few months we will be involved in five MURIs (in addition to our two NSF-sponsored NIRTs).


February 18, 2005
DURIP Proposal Funded. We have been funded  through the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP)/Army Research Office to purchase a blade-based computing cluster. The new local computer cluster, which will be for exclusive use of our group, will be located near the existing clusters in Engineering Building I on the NC State Centennial Campus.


January 10, 2005
New Administrative Assistant Joins the Group. Ms. Laura Neal has joined the group as a new adminstrative assistant. She will be helping with meeting arrangements, travel plans, and program budgets.


December 1, 2004
Computational Effort Moves to New Building on Centennial Campus. The computational group has moved with thepicture of engineering building I rest of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering to Engineering Building I on the NC State Centennial Campus. This building, which was completed just prior to the move, now houses both Materials Science and Chemical Engineering. Our  research group occupies two rooms on the third floor; these rooms includes student and postdoc desks as well as a  Beowulf computing cluster. An image of the new building just before completion is shown to the right.


July 11, 2004
Informal Workshop on Potential Development and New MURI Effort Held at NC State. Our group hosted an informal workshop on June 29 and 30, 2004. The purpose of this workshop was to (1) discuss common issues and progress related to the development of many-body interatomic potential energy functions, and (2) organize collaborations between the modeling groups from NC State and the University of Florida on MURI efforts aimed at the tribology of multifunctional materials for aerospace applications. Attendees included Professors Brenner, Wang and Zikry from NC State, Professors Sinnott and Phillpot from the University of Florida, Professor Stuart from Clemson University and Professor Harrison from the U.S. Naval Academy, as well as students and postdocs from each of these groups. The workshop report is available here.

June 1, 2004
Computational Team Joins Two New MURI Efforts. We have joined two new MURI teams. The first is based at NC State and is part of a large experimental-modeling effort that is developing the scientific basis for tribological properties in terms of scale-dependent thermal, chemical, and mechanical processes that is critical for the engineering of advanced materials and coatings with tailor-made properties for aerospace applications. The modeling team is composed of Prof. Brenner, Prof. Mohammed Zikry of the Mechanical Engineering Department and Prof. Judith Harrison of the U.S. Naval Academy. The modeling effort uses a hierarchy of continuum and atomic modeling to explore fundamental friction and wear phenomena, and to explore new materials with unique properties.

The second MURI team is lead by Prof. Steve Danyluk of Georgia Tech. The goal of this effort is to solve the problem of rail wear in railgun technologies. We are using a combination of atomic and continuum-level modeling techniques to charactize wear mechanisms at sliding metallic interfaces, in particular the interplay of frictional heating, heat conduction, plasma formation and electromagnetic migration, to explore coatings that can potentially inhibit wear.

With the two new MURI efforts, we are currently members of four MURI teams, one that is attempting to solve problems associated with the production of large, low defect density AlN and GaN wafers, and a second team that is developing new modeling tools for studying energetic materials.

June 1, 2004
New NSF Sponsored NIRT Team Established A new Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team lead by Professor Keith Gubbins of the NC State Chemical Engineering Department has been funded by the National Science Foundation. The new effort entitled "Surfactant Self-Assembly on Nano-Structured Surfaces: Multi-Scale Computational Prediction", involves Prof. Jerzy Bernholc of the NC State Physics Department and Prof. Sharon Glotzer of the University of Michigan.

This new NIRT effort complements the NIRT effort "Reduced Degree of Freedom Predictive Methods for Control and Design of Interfaces in Nanofeatured Systems: Nanocrystalline Materials, Sensors and Composites" that was started last year.

June 1, 2004
J. David Schall defends his Ph.D. Graduate student Dave Schall successfully defended by Ph.D. thesis today. Committee members included Prof. Brenner, Prof. Ron Scattergood and Prof. Philip Russel of the NC State Materials Science Department as well as Prof. Christopher Roland of the NC State Physics Department. Dr. Schall will stay in the group through the end of July before joining Prof. Judith Harrison at the U.S. Naval Academy as a postdoc.

May 28, 2004
Two St. Augustine's Students Start Summer Research Two undergraduate students from St. Augustine's College, Marlin Ellis and Olusola Afolabi, will be spending 8 weeks working with the Computational Materials Science team. Their research, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is part of our recruiting efforts to attract talented undergraduate students into our graduate program.

May 21, 2004
New Graduate Course on Modeling to be Offered A new course entitled "Modeling from the Nanoscale to the Macroscale" will be offered in the Fall 2004 semester. This is a graduate course that is being co-offered by the Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Physics Departments. Modern problems in materials modeling increasingly involve combinations of electronic, optical and mechanical properties, and often require a hierarchy of theory and modeling methods that span multiple time and length scales. Unfortunately, traditional curricula in the physical sciences and in engineering remain too constrictive to provide students with a sufficiently broad backgound in modeling methods to attack these problems. This course will provide a broad survey of modern theory and modeling methods for predicting and understanding the properties of materials. These methods will include quantum methods (e.g. density functional theory), molecular modeling (e.g. molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo methods), solid defect theory, and continuum modeling approaches. The course will use a combination of web-based lectures and hands on exercises with state-of-the-art modeling programs.

The course will be offered as a video course with lectures and exercises available over the internet. The course listing depends on the department through which students register. Please check departmental course listings for appropriate course number.