Users Group Meeting 2016

October 4-6, Seattle

The Materials Design® 2016 Annual User Group Meeting was held on October 4, 5, and 6 in the city's Crowne Plaza hotel in downtown Seattle. Participants traveled to Seattle from all corners of the world for the training and scientific sessions, and discussed computational materials science, and atomistic and electronic simulation methods with friends and colleagues.

Hannes Schweiger and Ray Shan led the training workshop at the meeting. The training sessions employed a new format with extended hands-on sessions and fewer presentations. This allowed in-depth analysis of a variety of calculation scenarios and an opportunity to apply these methods to any desired system. The new format and training materials were well received by participants and the focused hands-on sessions generated a number of interesting leads for future studies.

The technical sessions provided many updates on the use of atomistic and electronic simulation in an industrial setting. Examples ranged from the exploration of battery materials, to the scale up of catalytic ammoxidation, to the analysis of crystallization behavior as a function of process scale, to the development of practical alloys to meet exacting corrosion and strength specifications, and the development of a bio-based asphalt binder, and a wide ranging update on alloy simulation. Benoit Minisini provided a delightful overview of the use of MedeA® in teaching at an engineering school in France. Methodological talks included the latest developments from the VASP team by Martijn Marsmann, the simulation of electronic excitations by Dmitri Kilin, Philippe Sautet on structure activity relationships in heterogeneous catalysis, an update on forcefield simulation by Ray Shan, including discussion of the reactive forcefields ReaxFF and COMB3. Dave Rigby presented impressive results on property variation in crosslinked models as a function of dilution. An overview of new capabilities of MedeA® by the development team and discussions about future directions rounded off this successful meeting.

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