This month I was preparing to pass the final examination of PhD in the field of materials science. After passing the exam I got involved in writing the article to Materials Science and Engineering. To do so, I had to first complete the experiment with plane stress compression. All experiment works were done before the end of the month.

Participation at International Meeting: CALPHAD and THERMAM. Presentation of results of liquid binaries including atomistic calculations and those based on classical equation of atoms movement. They were compared to measured data. These studies were also supplemented by semi-empirical considerations.

I May I was studying various models which link
macroscopic boundary parameters to energies of boundaries.
I've written a piece of software that
assumes an energy function with some free parameters
and tries to fit the model to data from
molecular simulations available in literature.
This will allow for determination which model
describes best the relationship between geometry and energy.

In may I had some more opportunity to exercise with in-situ annealing of titanium samples inside FEG SEM with EBSD capabilities. This time we decided it would be interesting to perform heating with heating ratio similar to one used for DSC measurements and at specific temperatures where we expected something to happen (from DSC results) quickly cool down the sample, measure EBSD map and then repeat for the next temperature. We did as we planned and even with some problems with driting we managed to obtained some decent results. It seems however that this kind of experiment with titanium is strongly affected by surface oxidation which means big problem for diffraction image quality. On the other hand it seems possible that contamination mark on sample surface, created during preceding EBSD scan can have some inhibiting qualities when it comes to oxidation during sample heating.

May was the month extreme full of work. I finally completed writing a dissertation paper. I have done missing EBSD/SEM measurements for recrystallized samples of Al-Zr.
I also passed exams on philosophy and foreign language.