Tag: computational materials science

Nov 20 2018

Synthesis, characterization and thermodynamic stability of nanostructured ε-iron carbonitride powder prepared by a solid-state mechanochemical route

Authors: Seyyed Amin Rounaghi, Danny E. P. Vanpoucke, Elaheh Esmaeili, Sergio Scudino, and Jürgen Eckert
Journal: J. Alloys Compd. 778, 327-336 (2019)
doi: 10.1016/j.jallcom.2018.11.007
IF(2019): 4.650
export: bibtex
pdf: <JAlloysCompd>

Abstract

Nanostructured epsilon iron carbonitride (ε-Fe3CxN1-x, x ∼ 0.05) powder with high purity (>97 wt%) was synthesized through a simple mechanochemical reaction between metallic iron and melamine. Various characterization techniques were employed to investigate the chemical and physical characteristics of the milling intermediates and the final products. The thermodynamic stability of the different phases in the Fe-C-N ternary system, including nitrogen and carbon doped structures were studied through density functional theory (DFT) calculations. A Boltzmann-distribution model was developed to qualitatively assess the stability and the proportion of the different milling products vs. milling energy. The theoretical and experimental results revealed that the milling products mainly comprise the ε-Fe3CxN1-xphase with a mean crystallite size of around 15 nm and a trace of amorphous carbonmaterial. The thermal stability and magnetic properties of the milling products were thoroughly investigated. The synthesized ε-Fe3CxN1-x exhibited thermal stabilities up to 473 K and 673 K in air and argon atmospheres, respectively, and soft magnetic properties with a saturation magnetization of around 125 emu/g.

Nov 13 2018

Predicting Partial Atomic Charges in Siliceous Zeolites

Authors: Jarod J. Wolffis, Danny E. P. Vanpoucke, Amit Sharma, Keith V. Lawler, and Paul M. Forster
Journal: Microporous Mesoporous Mater. 277, 184-196 (2019)
doi: 10.1016/j.micromeso.2018.10.028
IF(2019): 4.551
export: bibtex
pdf: <MicroporousMesoporousMater>

 

Partial charges in zeolites for force fields.
Graphical Abstract: Partial charges in zeolites for force fields.

Abstract

Partial atomic charge, which determines the magnitude of the Coulombic non-bonding interaction, represents a critical parameter in molecular mechanics simulations. Partial charges may also be used as a measure of physical properties of the system, i.e. covalency, acidic/catalytic sites, etc. A range of methods, both empirical and ab initio, exist for calculating partial charges in a given solid, and several of them are compared here for siliceous (pure silica) zeolites. The relationships between structure and the predicted partial charge are examined. The predicted partial charges from different methods are also compared with related experimental observations, showing that a few of the methods offer some guidance towards identifying the T-sites most likely to undergo substitution or for proton localization in acidic framework forms. Finally, we show that assigning unique calculated charges to crystallographically unique framework atoms makes an appreciable difference in simulating predicting N2 and O2 adsorption with common dispersion-repulsion parameterizations.

Jul 27 2018

Book chapter: Computational Chemistry Experiment Possibilities

Authors: Bartłomiej M. Szyja and Danny Vanpoucke
Book: Zeolites and Metal-Organic Frameworks, (2018)
Chapter Ch 9, p 235-264
Title Computational Chemistry Experiment Possibilities
ISBN: 978-94-629-8556-8
export: bibtex
pdf: <Amsterdam University Press>
<Open Access>

 

Zeolites and Metal-Organic Frameworks (the hard-copy)

Abstract

Thanks to a rapid increase in the computational power of modern CPUs, computational methods have become a standard tool for the investigation of physico-chemical phenomena in many areas of chemistry and technology. The area of porous frameworks, such as zeolites, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent-organic frameworks (COFs), is not different. Computer simulations make it possible, not only to verify the results of the experiments, but even to predict previously inexistent materials that will present the desired experimental properties. Furthermore, computational research of materials provides the tools necessary to obtain fundamental insight into details that are often not accessible to physical experiments.

The methodology used in these simulations is quite specific because of the special character of the materials themselves. However, within the field of porous frameworks, density functional theory (DFT) and force fields (FF)
are the main actors. These methods form the basis of most computational studies, since they allow the evaluation of the potential energy surface (PES) of the system.

Related:

Newsflash: here

Jul 17 2018

Building bridges towards experiments.

Quantum Holy Grail: The Ground-State

Quantum mechanical calculations provide a powerful tool to investigate the world around us. Unfortunately it is also a computationally very expensive tool to use, which puts a boundary on what is possible in terms of computational materials research. For example, when investigating a solid at the quantum mechanical level, you are limited in the number of atoms that you can consider. Even with a powerful supercomputer at hand, a hundred to a thousand atoms are currently accessible for “routine” investigations. The computational cost also limits the number of configurations/combinations you can calculate.

However, in the end— and often with some blood sweat and tears—these calculations do provide you the ground-state structure and energy of your system. From this point forward you can continue characterizing its properties, life is beautiful and happy times are just beyond the horizon. At this horizon your experimental colleague awaits you. And he/she tells you:

Sorry, I don’t find that structure in my sample.

After recovering from the initial shock, you soon realize that in (materials science) experiments one seldom encounters a sample in “the ground-state”. Experiments are performed at temperatures above 0K and pressures above 0 Pa (even in vacuum :p ). Furthermore, synthesis methods often involve elevated temperatures, increased pressure, mechanical forces, chemical reactions,… which give rise to meta-stable configurations. In such an environment, your nicely deduced ground-state may be an exception to the rule. It is only one point within the phase-space of the possible.

So how can you deal with this? You somehow need to sample the phase-space available to the experiment.

Sampling Phase-Space for Ball-milling synthesis.

For a few years now, I have a very fruitful collaboration with Prof. Rounaghi. His interest goes toward the cheap fabrication of metal-nitrides. Our first collaboration focused on AlN, while later work included Ti, V and Cr-nitrides. Although this initial work had a strong focus on simple corroboration through the energies calculated at the quantum mechanical level, the collaboration also allowed me to look at my data in a different way. I wanted to “simulate” the reactions of ball-milling experiments more closely.

Due to the size-limitations of quantum mechanical calculations I played with the following idea:

  • Assume there exists a general master reaction which describes what happens during ball-milling.

X Al + Y Melamine → x1 Al + x2 Melamine + x3 AlN + …

where all the xi represent the fractions of the reaction products present.

  • With the boundary condition that the number of particles needs to be conserved, you end up with a large set of (x1,x2,x3,…) configurations which each have a certain energy. This energy is calculated using the quantum mechanical energies of each product. The configuration with the lowest energy is the ground state configuration. However, investigating the entire accessible phase-space showed that the energies of the other possible configurations are generally not that much higher.
  • What if we used the energy available due to ball-milling in the same fashion as we use kBT? And sample the phase-space using Boltzmann statistics.
  • The resulting Boltzmann distribution of the configurations available in the phase-space can then be used to calculate the mass/atomic fraction of each of the products and allow us to represent an experimental sample as a collection of small units with slightly different configurations, weighted according to their Boltzmann distribution.

This setup allowed me to see the evolution in end-products as function of the initial ratio in case of AlN, and in our current project to indicate the preferred Iron-nitride present.

Grid-sampling vs Monte-Carlo-sampling

Whereas the AlN system was relatively easy to investigate—the phase space was only 3 dimensional— the recent iron based system ended up being 4 dimensional when considering only host materials, and 10 dimensional when including defects. For a small 3-4D phase-space, it is possible to create an equally spaced grid and get converged results using a few million to a billion grid-points. For a 10D phase-space this is no longer possible. As you can no longer keep all data-points (easily) in storage during your calculation (imagine 1 Billion points, requiring you to store 11 double precision floats or about 82Gb) you need a method that does not rely on large arrays of data. For our Boltzmann statistics this gives us a bit of a pickle, as we need to have the global minimum of our phase space. A grid is too course to find it, while a simple Monte-Carlo just keeps hopping around.

Using Metropolis’s improvement of the Monte-Carlo approach was an interesting exercise, as it clearly shows the beauty and simplicity of the approach. This becomes even more awesome the moment you imagine the resources available in those days. I noted 82Gb being a lot, but I do have access to machines with those resources; its just not available on my laptop. In those days MANIAC supercomputers had less than 100 kilobyte of memory.

Although I theoretically no longer need the minimum energy configuration, having access to that information is rather useful. Therefore, I first search the phase-space for this minimum. This is rather tricky using Metropolis Monte Carlo (of course better techniques exist, but I wanted to be a bit lazy), and I found that in the limit of T→0 the algorithm will move toward the minimum. This, however, may require nearly 100 million steps of which >99.9% are rejected. As it only takes about 20 second on a modern laptop…this isn’t a big issue.

Finding a minimum using Metropolis Monte Carlo.

Finding a minimum using Metropolis Monte Carlo.

Next, a similar Metropolis Monte Carlo algorithm can be used to sample the entire phase space. Using 109 sample points was already sufficient to have a nicely converged sampling of the phase space for the problem at hand. Running the calculation for 20 different “ball-milling” energies took less than 2 hours, which is insignificant, when compared to the resources required to calculate the quantum mechanical ground state energies (several years). The figure below shows the distribution of the mass fraction of one of the reaction products as well as the distribution of the energies of the sampled configurations.

Metropolis Monte Carlo distribution of mass fraction and configuration energies for 3 sets of sample points.

Metropolis Monte Carlo distribution of mass fraction and configuration energies for 3 sets of sample points.

This clearly shows us how unique and small the quantum mechanical ground state configuration and its contribution is compared to the remainder of the phase space. So of course the ground state is not found in the experimental sample but that doesn’t mean the calculations are wrong either. Both are right, they just look at reality from a different perspective. The gap between the two can luckily be bridged, if one looks at both sides of the story. 

 

Jun 07 2018

Science Figured out

Diamond and CPU's, now still separated, but how much longer will this remain the case? Top left: Thin film N-doped diamond on Si (courtesy of Sankaran Kamatchi). Top right: Very old Pentium 1 CPU from 1993 (100MHz), with µm architecture. Bottom left: more recent intel core CPU (3GHz) of 2006 with nm scale architecture. Bottom right: Piece of single crystal diamond. A possible alternative for silicon, with 20x higher thermal conductivity, and 7x higher mobility of charge carriers.

Diamond and CPU’s, now still separated, but how much longer will this remain the case?
Top left: Thin film N-doped diamond on Si (courtesy of Sankaran Kamatchi). Top right: Very old Pentium 1 CPU from 1993 (100MHz), with µm architecture. Bottom left: more recent intel core CPU (3GHz) of 2006 with nm scale architecture. Bottom right: Piece of single crystal diamond. A possible alternative for silicon, with 20x higher thermal conductivity, and 7x higher mobility of charge carriers.

Can you pitch your research in 3 minutes, this is the concept behind “wetenschap uitgedokterd/science figured out“. A challenge I accepted after the fun I had at the science-battle. If I can explain my work to a public of 6 to 12 year-olds, explaining it to adults should be possible as well. However, 3 minutes is very short (although some may consider this long in the current bitesize world), especially if you have to explain something far from day-to-day life and can not assume any scientific background.

Where to start? Capture the imagination: “Imagine a world where you are a god.”

Link back to the real world. “All modern-day high-tech toys are more and more influenced by the atomic scale details.” Over the last decade, I have seen the nano-scale progress slowly but steadily into the realm of real-life materials research. This almost invisible trend will have a huge impact on materials science in the coming decade, because more and more we will see empirical laws breaking down, and it will become harder and harder to fit trends of materials using a classical mindset, something which has worked marvelously for materials science during the last few centuries. Modern and future materials design (be it solar cells, batteries, CPU’s or even medicine) will have to rely on quantum mechanical intuition and hence quantum mechanical simulations. (Although there is still much denial in that regard.)

Is there a problem to be solved? Yes indeed: “We do not have quantum mechanical intuition by nature, and manipulating atoms is extremely hard in practice and for practical purposes.” Although popular science magazines every so often boast pictures of atomic scale manipulation of atoms and the quantum regime, this makes it far from easy and common inside and outside the university lab. It is amazing how hard these things tend to get (ask your local experimental materials research PhD) and the required blood, sweat and tears are generally not represented in the glory-parade of a scientific publication.

Can you solve this? Euhm…yes…at least to some extend. “Computational materials research can provide the quantum mechanical intuition we human beings lack, and gives us access to atomic scale manipulation of a material.” Although computational materials science is seen by experimentalists as theory, and by theoreticians as experiments, it is neither and both. Computational materials science combines the rigor and control of theory, with access to real-life systems of experiments. It, unfortunately also suffers the limitations of both: as the system is still idealized (but to much lesser extend than in theoretical work) and control is not absolute (you have to follow where the algorithms take you, just as an experimentalist has to follow where the reaction takes him/her). But, if these strengths and weaknesses are balanced wisely (requires quite a few years of experience) an expert will gain fundamental insights in experiments.

Animation representing the buildup of a diamond surface in computational work.

Animation representing the buildup of a diamond surface in computational work.

As a computational materials scientist, you build a real-life system, atom by atom, such that you know exactly where everything is located, and then calculate its properties based on the rules of quantum mechanics, for example. In this sense you have absolute control as in theory. This comes at a cost (conservation of misery 🙂 ); where nature itself makes sure the structure is the “correct one” in experiments, you have to find it yourself in computational work. So you generally end up calculating many possible structural combinations of your atoms to first find out which is the one most probable to represent nature.

So what am I actually doing? “I am using atomic scale quantum mechanical computations to investigate the materials my experimental colleagues are studying, going from oxides to defects in diamond.” I know this is vague, but unfortunately, the actual work is technical. Much effort goes into getting the calculations to run in the direction you want them to proceed (This is the experimental side of computational materials science.). The actual goal varies from project to project. Sometimes, we want to find out which material is most stable, and which material is most likely to diffuse into the other, while at other times we want to understand the electronic structure, to test if a defect is really luminescent, this to trace the source of the experimentally observed luminescence. Or if you want to make it more complex, even find out which elements would make diamond grow faster.

Starting from this, I succeeded in creating a 3-minute pitch of my research for Science Figured out. The pitch can be seen here (in Dutch, with English subtitles that can be switched on through the cogwheel in the bottom right corner).

Some external links:

 

May 22 2018

VSC User Day 2018

Today, I am attending the 4th VSC User Day at the “Paleis de Academiën” in Brussels. Flemish researchers for whom the lifeblood of their research flows through the chips of a supercomputer are gathered here to discuss their experiences and present their research.

Some History

About 10 years ago, at the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008, the 5 Flemish universities founded the Flemish Supercomputer Center (VSC). A virtual organisation with one central goal:  Combine their strengths and know-how with regard to High Performance Compute (HPC) centers to make sure they were competitive with comparable HPC centers elsewhere.

By installing a super-fast network between the various university compute centers, each Flemish researcher has nowadays access to state-of-the-art computer infrastructure, independent of his or her physical location. A researcher at the University of Hasselt, like myself, can easily run calculations on the supercomputers installed at the university of Ghent or Leuven. In October 2012 the existing university supercomputers, so-called Tier-2 supercomputers, are joined by the first Flemish Tier-1 supercomputer, which was housed at the brand new data-centre of Ghent University. This machine is significantly larger than the existing Tier-2 machines, and allows Belgium to become the 25th member of the PRACE network, a European network which provides computational researchers access to the best and largest computer facilities in Europe. The fast development of computational research in Flanders and the explosive growth in the number of computational researchers, combined with the first shared Flemish supercomputer (in contrast to the university TIER-2 supercomputers, which some still consider private property rather than part of VSC) show the impact of the virtual organisation that is the VSC. As a result, on January 16th 2014, the first VSC User Day is organised, bringing together HPC users from all 5 universities  and industry. Here the users share their experiences and discuss possible improvements and changes. Since then, the first Tier-1 supercomputer has been decommissioned and replaced by a brand new Tier-1 machine, this time located at the KU Leuven. Furthermore, the Flemish government has put 30M€ aside for super-computing in Flanders, making sure that also in the future Flemish computational research stays competitive. The future of computational research in Flanders looks bright.

Today is User Day 2018

During the 4th VSC User Day, researchers of all 5 Flemish universities will be presenting the work they are performing on the supercomputers of the VSC network. The range of topics is very broad: from first principles materials modelling to chip design, climate modelling and space weather. In addition there will also be several workshops, introducing new users to the VSC and teaching advanced users the finer details of GPU-code and code optimization and parallelization. This later aspect is hugely important during the use of supercomputers in an academic context. Much of the software used is developed or modified by the researchers themselves. And even though this software can present impressive behavior, it doe not speed up automatically if you provide it access to more CPU’s. This is a very non-trivial task the researchers has to take care of, by carefully optimizing and parallelizing his or her code.

To support the researchers in their work, the VSC came up with ingenious poster-prizes. The three best posters will share 2018 node days of calculation time (about 155 years of calculations on a normal simple computer).

Wish me luck!

 

Single-slide presentation of my poster @VSC User Day 2018.

Single-slide presentation of my poster @VSC User Day 2018.

Jan 19 2018

Newsflash: Book-chapter on MOFs and Zeolites en route to bookstores near you.

It is almost a year ago that I wrote a book-chapter, together with Bartek Szyja, on MOFs and Zeolites. Coming March 2018, the book will be available through University press. It is interesting to note that in a 13 chapter book, ours was the only chapter dealing with the computational study and simulation of these materials…so there is a lot more that can be done by those who are interested and have the patience to perform these delicate and often difficult but extremely rewarding studies. From my time as a MOF researcher I have learned two important things:

  1. Any kind of interesting/extreme/silly physics you can imagine will be present in some MOFs. In this regard, the current state of the MOF/COF field is still in its infancy as most experimental work focuses on  simple applications such as catalysis and gas storage, for which other materials may be better suited. These porous materials may be theoretically interesting for direct industrial application, but the synthesis cost generally will be a bottleneck. Instead, looking toward the fundamental physics applications: Low dimensional magnetism, low dimensional conduction, spin-filters, multiferroics, electron-phonon interactions, interactions between spin and mechanical properties,…. MOFs are a true playground for the theoretician.
  2. MOFs are very hard to simulate correctly, so be wary of all (published) results that come computationally cheap and easy. Although the unit-cell of any MOF is huge, with regard to standard solid state materials, the electron interactions are also quite long range, so the first Brillouin zone needs very accurate sampling (something often neglected). Also spin-configurations can have a huge influence, especially in systems with a rather flat potential energy surface.

In the book-chapter, we discuss some basic techniques used in the computational study of MOFs, COFs, and Zeolites, which will be of interest to researchers starting in the field. We discuss molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo, as well as Density Functional Theory and all its benefits and limitations.

Open Access version of the book.

Nov 12 2017

Slow science: the case of Pt induced nanowires on Ge(001)

Free-standing Pt-induced nanowire on Ge(001).

Simulated STM image of the Pt-induced nanowires on the Ge(001) surface. Green discs indicate the atomic positions of the bulk-Ge atoms; red: Pt atoms embedded in the top surface layers; yellow: Ge atoms forming the nanowire observed by STM.

Ten years ago, I was happily modeling Pt nanowires on Ge(001) during my first Ph.D. at the university of Twente. As a member of the Computational Materials Science group, I also was lucky to have good and open contact with the experimental research group of Prof. Zandvliet, whom was growing these nanowires. In this environment, I learned there is a big difference between what is easy in experiment and what is easy in computational research. It also taught me to find a common ground which is “easy” for both (Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) images in this specific case).

During this 4-year project, I quickly came to the conclusion that the nanowires could not be formed by Pt atoms, but that it needed to be Ge atoms instead. Although the simulated STM images were  very convincing, it was really hard to overcome the experimental intuition…and experiments which seemed to contradict this picture (doi: 10.1016/j.susc.2006.07.055 ). As a result, I spend a lot of time learning about the practical aspects of the experiments (an STM tip is a complicated thing) and trying to extract every possible piece of information published and unpublished. Especially the latter provided important support. The “ugly”(=not good for publishing) experimental pictures tended to be real treasures from my computational point of view. Of course, much time was spent on tweaking the computational model to get a perfect match with experiments (e.g. the 4×1 periodicity), and trying to reproduce experiments seemingly supporting the “Ge-nanowire” model (e.g. simulation of CO adsorption and identification of the path along the wire the molecule follows.).

In contrast to my optimism at the end of my first year (I believed all modeling could be finished before my second year ended), the modeling work ended up being a very complex exercise, taking 4 years of research. Now I am happy that I was wrong, as the final result ended up being very robust and became “The model for Pt induced nanowires on Ge(001)“.

Upon doing a review article on this field five years after my Ph.D. I was amazed (and happy) to see my model still stood. Even more, there had been complex experimental studies (doi: 10.1103/PhysRevB.85.245438) which even seemed to support the model I proposed. However, these experiments were stil making an indirect comparison. A direct comparison supporting the Ge nature of the nanowires was still missing…until recently.

In a recent paper in Phys. Rev. B (doi: 10.1103/PhysRevB.96.155415) a Japanese-Turkish collaboration succeeded in identifying the nanowire atoms as Ge atoms. They did this using an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) and a sample of Pt induced nanowires, in which some of the nanowire atoms were replaced by Sn atoms. The experiment rather simple in idea (execution however requires rather advanced skills): compare the forces experienced by the AFM when measuring the Sn atom, the chain atoms and the surface atoms. The Sn atoms are easily recognized, while the surface is known to consist of Ge atoms. If the relative force of the chain atom is the same as that of the surface atoms, then the chain consists of Ge atoms, while if the force is different, the chain consists of Pt atoms.

*small drum-roll*

And they found the result to be the same.

Yes, after nearly 10 years since my first publication on the subject, there finally is experimental proof that the Pt nanowires on Ge(001) consist of Ge atoms. Seeing this paper made me one happy computational scientist. For me it shows the power of computational research, and provides an argument why one should not be shy to push calculations to their limit. The computational cost may be high, but at least one is performing relevant work. And of course, never forget, the most seemingly easy looking experiments are  usually not easy at all, so as a computational materials scientist you should not take them for granted, but let those experimentalists know how much you appreciate their work and effort.

Oct 26 2017

Audioslides tryout.

One of the new features provided by Elsevier upon publication is the creation of audioslides. This is a kind of short presentation of the publication by one of the authors. I have been itching to try this since our publication on the neutral C-vancancy was published. The interface is quite intuitive, although the adobe flash tend to have a hard time finding the microphone. However, once it succeeds, things go quite smoothly. The resolution of the slides is a bit low, which is unfortunate (but this is only for the small-scale version, the large-scale version is quite nice as you can see in the link below). Maybe I’ll make a high resolution version video and put it on Youtube, later.

The result is available here (since the embedding doesn’t play nicely with WP).

And a video version can be found here.
 

Sep 23 2017

Revisiting the Neutral C-Vacancy in Diamond: Localization of Electrons through DFT+U

Authors: Danny E. P. Vanpoucke and Ken Haenen
Journal: Diam. Relat. Mater 79, 60-69 (2017)
doi: 10.1016/j.diamond.2017.08.009
IF(2017): 2.232
export: bibtex
pdf: <DiamRelatMater>

 

Combining a scan over possible values for U and J with reference electronic structures obtained using the hybrid functional HSE06, DFT+U can be fit to provide hybrid functional quality electronic structures at the cost of DFT calculations.
Graphical Abstract: Combining a scan over possible values for U and J with reference electronic structures obtained using the hybrid functional HSE06, DFT+U can be fit to provide hybrid functional quality electronic structures at the cost of DFT calculations.

Abstract

The neutral C-vacancy is investigated using density functional theory calculations. We show that local functionals, such as PBE, can predict the correct stability order of the different spin states, and that the success of this prediction is related to the accurate description of the local magnetic configuration. Despite the correct prediction of the stability order, the PBE functional still fails predicting the defect states correctly. Introduction of a fraction of exact exchange, as is done in hybrid functionals such as HSE06, remedies this failure, but at a steep computational cost. Since the defect states are strongly localized, the introduction of additional on site Coulomb and exchange interactions, through the DFT+U method, is shown to resolve the failure as well, but at a much lower computational cost. In this work, we present optimized U and J parameters for DFT+U calculations, allowing for the accurate prediction of defect states in defective
diamond. Using the PBE optimized atomic structure and the HSE06 optimized electronic structure as reference, a pair of on-site Coulomb and exchange parameters (U,J) are fitted for DFT+U studies of defects in diamond.

Related:

Poster-presentation: here

DFT+U series (varying J) for a specific spin state of the C-vacancy defect.

DFT+U series (varying J) for a specific spin state of the C-vacancy defect.