The properties of almost any material are largely determined by its structure and especially by its microstructure. MICRESS®- the MICRostructure Evolution Simulation Software - is a software package that enables the calculation of microstructure formation in time and space during phase transformations, especially in metallurgical systems. It is maintained and distributed by ACCESS e.V., a non-profit research center at the Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), with revenue from sales being re-invested into maintenance and further development of the code.
The software is based on the multiphase-field concept which has been developed by ACCESS e.V. scientists since 1995. The evolution of a microstructure is essentially governed by thermodynamic driving forces, diffusion and interfacial curvature. The strength of the MICRESS® code is that these aspects are treated simultaneously in a comprehensive manner. The backbone of MICRESS® is the multiphase field method for multicomponent alloys and enables the treatment of multiphase, multigrain and multicomponent problems in the fields of solidification, grain growth, recrystallization and solid state phase transformations. Using this versatile and general tool all these phenomena can be addressed in a common model framework. In the case of multicomponent alloys, the required thermodynamic data can either be provided in the form of local linear approximations of the phase diagrams, or by direct coupling to thermodynamic data sets via a dedicated TQ interface developed in collaboration with Thermo-Calc AB, Stockholm.The software covers phase evolution, solutal and thermal diffusion and elastic transformation strain in the solid state. 2D and 3D simulations are possible and the size of the simulation domain, the number of grains, phases and components are chiefly restricted by available memory size and CPU speed. Shared memory parallelisation is supported for the diffusion, mechanical and flow solvers.