Materials Science Research Lecture

Webinar Link:

https://caltech.zoom.us/j/95708772987

Webinar ID: 957 0877 2987

Abstract:

In recent years, rapid advances in the methods to make, model and characterize materials has led to the development of frameworks to accelerate the pace at which new materials for engineering applications can be discovered and designed. In the area of advanced structural materials, such methods are finding growing applications, in areas ranging from lightweighting in transportation, to meeting the challenges of extreme conditions realized in energy conversion and aerospace applications. Here we discuss an example of this approach to materials design, focusing on high-temperature materials used in space-flight applications. We demonstrate how rapid iteration between experiment and computation has led to the design of a new multi-principal-element metallic alloy "from scratch," and highlight new directions that the work suggests. In particular, we discuss the idea that alloy design can be enabled not only through control of phase combinations realized in their microstructure, as is common practice in this area, but also through the control of interfacial phases. We introduce this topic in the context of alloy design and describe recent new insights into how such interfacial phases might be controlled.

More about the Speaker:

Professor Asta received his PhD from University of California (UC), Berkeley, in 1993. He subsequently joined Sandia National Laboratories as a postdoc, and then as technical staff. In 2000 he joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) at Northwestern University, receiving tenure in 2003. In 2005 he moved to UC Davis, where he was hired under an initiative for computational science, as a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, where became Vice Chair in 2008. In 2010 he joined the MSE Department at UC Berkeley, with a faculty scientist appointment at Lawrence Berkley National Lab (LBNL). He served as Department Chair of Berkeley MSE from July, 2012 – January, 2018. Since January 1, 2018 he has been serving as Materials Sciences Division Director at LBNL.

Professor Asta's research focuses on the development and application of atomistic computational methods for calculating bulk and interfacial thermodynamic and kinetic properties of materials, and for computationally-guided materials discovery and design. He was awarded ASM International's Materials Research Silver Medal Award in 2002, Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010, the TMS Functional Materials Division Distinguished Scientist/Engineer Award in 2013, the TMS Hume-Rothery Award in 2019, Fellow of the TMS in 2020, and the ASM Gibbs Award in 2020. In 2015 he was named the Arthur C. and Phyllis G. Oppenheimer Professor of Advanced Materials Analysis at UC Berkeley.