Designing optimal microstructures for solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) electrodes is complicated due to the multitude of electro-chemo-physical phenomena taking place simultaneously that directly affect working conditions of a SOFC electrode and its performance. In this study, a new design paradigm is presented to obtain a balance between electrochemical sites in the form of triple phase boundary (...

Improvement of thermally sprayed coating properties by microstructure modification has been considered as a significant solution. Therefore, in this research the effect of dissolved oxygen content and post heat treatment on the formation and distribution of secondary phase particles, particularly in nano-scale in the coatings during spraying and after that were studied. Ni-5 wt% Al powders were...

Microstructures significantly impact the performance of sensitively engineered components, such as wireless impact detectors used in military vehicles or sensors used in aircrafts. These components can operate safely only within a certain range of frequencies, and frequencies outside that range can lead to instability because of resonance. This paper addresses optimization of the microstructure...

Nacre, bone and spider silk are staggered composites where inclusions of high aspect ratio reinforce a softer matrix. Such staggered composites have emerged through natural selection as the best configuration to produce stiffness, strength and toughness simultaneously. As a result, these remarkable materials are increasingly serving as model for synthetic composites with unusual and attractive ...

This paper is devoted to minimum stress design in structural optimization. The homogenization method is extended to such a framework and yields an efficient numerical algorithm for topology optimization. The main idea is to use a partial relaxation of the problem obtained by introducing special microstructures which are sequential laminated composites. Indeed, the so-called corrector terms of s...

A posteriori error estimates are derived in the context of two-dimensional structural elastic shape optimization under the compliance objective. It is known that the optimal shape features are microstructures that can be constructed using sequential lamination. The descriptive parameters explicitly depend on the stress. To derive error estimates the dual weighted residual approach for control p...

The measurement and optimization of microstructure development in organic semiconductor films is valuable because microstructure in many cases critically impacts electronic performance. We demonstrate a general method to measure microstructure thickness dependence in thin films using surface-sensitive near edge X-ray absorbance fine structure (NEXAFS) spectroscopy. The method is applied to an o...

The property of any material is essentially determined by its microstructure. Numerical models are increasingly the focus of modern engineering as helpful tools for tailoring and optimization of custom-designed microstructures by suitable processing and alloy design. A huge variety of software tools is available to predict various microstructural aspects for different materials. In the general ...

Risk averse stochastic optimization is investigated in the context of elastic shape optimization, allowing for microstructures in the admissible shapes. In particular, a two-stage model for shape optimization under stochastic loading with risk averse cost functionals is combined with a two-scale approach for the simulation of microstructured materials. The microstructure is composed of an elast...