Design of Layer-Structured Mg Alloys : Role of SRO clusters

Prof. Eiji Abe, the University of Tokyo, Japan

14:00-15:30, October 13, 2023

Yiucheng Lecture Hall (500), Xu Zuyao Building

Biography

Prof. Abe received his bachelor's, Master's and doctoral degrees from Tohoku University in 1991, 1993 and 2001, respectively. From 1993/04 - 2005/03, he worked as a researcher and senior researcher fellow at the National Institute for Material Research (NIMS) in Japan, and engaged in academic research as a visiting scholar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory of American from 2002/01 - 2003/01. From 2005/04 - 2016/02 and 2016/03-now, he has served as an associate Professor and full Professor, respectively, at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Tokyo, Japan. At the same time, Prof. Abe has also served as a specially appointed researcher of NIMS since 2016/04. Between 2021-2022, Prof. Abe served as the head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Tokyo. Prof. Abe has long been engaged in characterizing the microstructure of metal materials (magnesium, aluminum and high-entropy alloys), rare-earth compounds, quasicrystals and other materials by TEM/STEM techniques, X-ray/electron diffraction and computer simulation/first-principles calculation. He has published numbers of papers in many internationally renowned journals, including Nature, Nature Materials, Physical Review Letters, Chemical Society Reviews, Acta Materialia, International Journal of Plasticity and Scripta Materialia. From 2009- 2016, he served as editor and Co-Editors-in-Chief of Microscopy. He has been the editor of Journal of Alloys and Compounds since 2017 and the associate editor of Frontiers in Materials since 2022.

Abstract

Dilute Mg alloys containing a few atomic percent of transition-metal and rare-earth element have attracted increasing attentions because of their excellent mechanical properties. The remarkable microstructural feature common for all these Mg alloys is the formation of a novel type of long-period stacking/order (LPSO) structures, which reveal a remarkable strength through the warm-extrusion process. Recently, for the LPSO structures and their derivative layer structures, we have found a critical role of solute short-range order (SRO) clusters that significantly contribute a phase stability. In the talk, I briefly describe several examples of the SRO clusters in the LPSO-related Mg alloys, based on atomic-resolution STEM experiments and DFT/thermodynamic calculations.