Saturday 10 September 2016

FMD at ICAMM 2016

ICAMM 2016 is the International Conference for Advanced Materials Modelling, held at the end of August in Rennes, France. The conference was also preceded by a training workshop for the quantum mechanics program, VASP. From the FMD research groups, Dr Chris Handley, and PhD students, Emilio Pradal Velazquez and Stavrina Dimosthenous attended for this 9 day long event. It was a great opportunity to both learn how to use a new computer program for materials discovery, and also meet and watch talks from various experts in different fields of materials design.

A significant number of talks were devoted to the topic of hybrid halide-organic perovskites, and their potential use a photovoltaic material. Chris presented his work (just submitted) on designing a new forcefield for modelling methylammonium lead iodide, which was well received given it allows for far larger simulations of the materials that are not possible when using quantum mechanical simulations.

"With the University of Sheffield bringing on line in the New Year a new HPC server, that makes use of the new generation of GPUs, it will be possible to use VASP to perform significant calculations, in conjunction with NMR and XRD, to understand materials and their properties" - Chris Handley


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You can just see Chris in the front row, 4th in front the right, with Emilio to the left, and Stavrina to Emilio's left.


Part way through the workshop/conference there was an excursion to Mont Saint Michel.