  Many studies of especially dust nucleation in winds of carbon-rich AGB stars
consider primarily carbon as dust forming material. But dust grains formed in
such circumstellar envelopes are rather a mixture of several chemical elements
such as titanium or silicon in addition to the main component carbon as
verified by many investigations of pre-solar grains enclosed in meteorites, for
example. In this contribution we focus on the study of the nucleation of
titanium carbide particles from the gas phase. Therefore, the necessary
properties of molecular titanium carbide clusters have been estimated within
density functional approaches and first implications on the homogeneous
nucleation of TiC are studied for conditions being representative for
circumstellar dust shells around carbon-rich AGB stars.
