Dear MICRESS user,
this is to notify you about the most recent release of your MICRESS® software package. This present release 5.4 of MICRESS® comprises a number of improvements with respect to input/output and performance as well as new functionalities. Of course we also attempted to fix all bugs reported by the user community. Please don’t hesitate to ask us for more details about the individual improvements via this MICRESS®-Forum.
Input/Output
The new “terse input mode' largely facilitates the input respectively the creation of the dri-file especially for systems with a large number of phases. All phase interactions are initially set to “no-interaction” and can be switched on individually. Identical types of interaction now can be easily specified as “same as….” instead of re-listing all parameters. Similar short notations are possible for the definition of phase data and diffusion data.
With respect to specification of output results it is now possible to specify only desired output without the need of explicitly specifying undesired output. The list of desired outputs is finalized by stating “no further output”.
The text file output .TabGD comprises a lot of information about the individual grains and can be used, e.g. to generate grain size distribution functions.
The new option to create 'rescaled outputs' allows storing output files at a lower resolution than required for stable simulations. Besides saving disk space, this feature allows for comparison with other simulations done with a different resolution.
MICRESS 5.4 comprises a new, additional output format called “vtk” (visualisation toolkit). This format especially is suitable for analysis and visualisation of 3D results. Viewers for VTK formats are available as freeware like e.g paraview from Kitware (www.paraview.org). The new version of DisplayMICRESS also allows the conversion of old data into the .vtk format.
New Functionalities
The “particle pinning” model can now be defined with temperature dependant parameters.
The enthalpies influencing the thermal field due to release of latent heat can now be read via the TQ interface from the GES-data file.,
A new one dimensional thermal field extension has been implemented allowing for calculation of long range temperature fields with a 1D symmetry, e. g. linear or spherical. A variety of boundary conditions like time-dependant temperature, temperature gradient, heat-flux, isolation and heat-transfer coefficient can be specified
In the seed density model for heterogeneous nucleation, a clustering of seeds can now be specified.
More flexible corrections for 3D effects in 2D calculations are now possible via an extended pseudo-3D model.
Performance
A further optimization of the internal data structures leads to decreasing calculation times for problems comprising many grains (more then several hundreds…) or many phases.
Additional outputs (TabTQ, TabP and numR ) support the analysis of the MICRESS® runtime performance. These outputs allow to identify bottlenecks for the calculation time and therefore help to optimise parameter settings in order to speed up the simulation.
The numerical handling of stoichiometric phases has been improved to reduce numerical stability problems.
We hope that these improvements will assist you in solving your problems and will continue to make MICRESS® a valuable tool for your research. For more details, please don’t hesitate to ask us, preferentially via the MICRESS®-Forum (www.micress.de/forum)
Yours
George