Monika Rolinska

I have completed both my bachelor’s and master’s degree within the five-year Materials Design program at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, earning the degree of Master of Science in Engineering (Civilingenjör) in 2021. Originally, I was not thinking of studying metallic materials at all, but during my first three years at KTH I became really interested in the subject, particularly in the aspect of materials and process design. I chose to pursue my master’s degree within Engineering Materials Science (Industrial materials track), a program with a strong emphasis on metallic materials, cemented carbides and metallurgy. I wrote my thesis on extraction replicas, a method of characterization of small precipitates in collaboration with Swerim AB, where my interest in phase transformations and materials characterization grew a lot, making me apply for a PhD position within SwedNess.

My project in SwedNess will be focused on the study of early stage phase transformations with in-situ neutron and x-ray scattering, in order to provide data for an improved computational framework for nucleation modelling in alloys. Materials design is largely dependent on the understanding of phase transformations, which are controlled by nucleation, diffusion and interfacial mobility. Modelling of nucleation has historically been quite complicated, and the behavior of some important engineering materials does not follow classical nucleation theory which is the most widely employed nucleation theory in computational materials design. Both experimental and theoretical methods have evolved dramatically in the past decades, and now the goal is to map nucleation behavior of a model alloy and implement the data in mean-field and possibly CALPHAD modeling, where the experimental results will be supported by ab initio modelling.