From February 11 to 15, our colleagues from the University of Manchester (UK), Prof. Michael Anderson and PhD student Adam Hill are working at SCTMS. Our cooperation includes the development of a unified kinetic 3D partition model to predict the growth of crystals of substances of various nature.In 2017, our joint work on this topic was published in Nature – "Predicting crystal growth via a unified kinetic three-dimensional partition model". Then the scientific group included scientists from the University of Manchester, SCTMS, SINTEF Materials and Chemistry (Norway) and Curtin University (Australia).
During this visit, we plan to improve the model to predict more accurately the growth of ionic and molecular crystals. Understanding and predicting the crystal growth is fundamental for the control of functionality of modern materials. Despite the investigations being performed for over one hundred years, only recently the molecular intricacies of these processes have been revealed by scanning probe microscopies. In order to bring some order and understanding to this vast amount of new information requires new rules to be developed and tested. To date, because of the complexity and variety of different crystal systems, this has relied on developing models that are usually constrained to one system only. Such work is painstakingly slow and will not be able to achieve the wide scope of understanding in order to create a unified model across crystal types and crystal structures.
The research team headed by Michael Anderson proposes a new approach to understand and, predict the growth of crystals, including the incorporation of defect structures, by simultaneous molecular-scale simulation of crystal habit and surface topology using a unified kinetic 3-D partition model.
During his visit to Samara Prof. Michael Anderson gave an open lecture at SCTMS on the developed method and illustrated his approach by predicting the crystal growth of a diverse set of crystal types including zeolites, metal-organic frameworks, calcite, urea and L-cystine.
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