Our work on solidification concerns the study of the interactions between all the physical phenomena taking place during the liquid to solid transformation – such as nucleation and growth of solid phases, fluid flow, thermal and mass transport and gas evolution - to learn how to engineer better cast microstructures. Current research focuses on how to increase impurity tolerance during aluminium recycling through the development of novel refiners and additions for intermetallic phases.
We use X-ray imaging to observe in-situ the dynamic evolution of solidification microstructures and develop methodologies to extract quantified information of key solidification parameters. We also collaborate with scientists at various synchrotrons and STFC to develop new multi-modal approaches to enhance the analytical capabilities of X-ray imaging and apply artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the analysis of the huge datasets generated during in-situ experiments.
