Extreme mechanics, materials, and manufacturing across scales

Guest Speaker：Assistant Professor ZOU Yu，University of Toronto，Canada

Inviter:  Assoc. Prof. WANG Hongze

Thursday，14. December

10:00-11:30

Yiucheng Lecture Hall (500), Xu Zuyao Building

Biography

Dr. Yu Zou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering (primary appointed) and Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto (U of T). Before he joined U of T in 2018, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT (with Prof. A. John Hart). He received his Ph.D., Master’s, and bachelor’s degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from ETH Zurich (with Prof. Ralph Spolenak), McGill University (with Profs. Jerzy Szpunar and Stephen Yue), and Beihang University (with Prof. Hua-Ming Wang), respectively. He was also a JSPS visiting scholar at Kyoto University (with Prof. Takayuki Kitamura). His research areas include physical metallurgy, nanomechanics, microstructural analysis, and metal additive manufacturing, for aerospace, automotive, energy, and health applications. Dr. Zou has garnered several major early-career awards in the materials community, including the 2022 TMS Early Career Faculty Fellow Award, 2021 Young Leaders Professional Development Award, and 2020 JMR Early Career Scholars Prize.

Abstract

Many of today's most critical infrastructure and machinery (for example, next-generation turbines, mineral exploration equipment, nuclear reactors, and critical medical implants) are made with materials that operate under extreme conditions, including high temperature, pressure, strain rate, cyclic loading, and radiative and chemical environments. Innovations in material development and manufacturing processes for such demanding conditions are necessary and urgent to increase the service life of existing infrastructure and to open the door to new applications. Towards this vision, my seminar will focus on the exploration of mechanical behavior and manufacturing processes of materials across many length- and time-scales. I will first introduce our recently developed versatile in situ nanomechanical testing platform that allows us to study the mechanical behavior of materials at the micrometer- and nanometer-scales under high temperatures, strain rates, and electric fields, which has not been explored before. Then, I will share insights on the mechanical and thermal stability of emerging nanostructured refractory high-entropy alloys: We have achieved mechanically strong and thermally stable nanocrystalline alloys, surpassing conventional nickel-based superalloys and pure tungsten. We have also developed new manufacturing approaches for the mass production of nanocrystalline high-entropy alloys towards commercialization. Moreover, I will talk about my research on metal additive manufacturing of titanium alloys and high-entropy alloys.