Life cycle assessment for better sustainability — opportunities and challenges of lightweight alloys

Guest Speaker：Senior Lecturer Dong Qiu，RMIT University, Australia

Inviter: Assoc. Prof. Jingya Wang

Date&Time: Tuesday, 14.Jan., 10:00-11:30

Venue: Yiucheng Lecture Hall (500) , Xu Zuyao Building

Biography:

Dr Qiu was awarded a PhD degree majored in materials science and engineering from Tsinghua University in 2005. He had been working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and then Australian Research Fellow at the University of Queensland from 2005 to 2014. Dr Qiu joined RMIT University in 2015 as a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow. In the last 10 years, his research has spanned a range of areas, such as grain refinement of cast metals, crystallography in solid-solid phase transformations and surface modification of biomedical implants. His contribution to the research community is witnessed by 98 peer-reviewed journal papers, with 1 out of those published in Nature, 3 published in Nature Communications, 18 published in Acta Materialia, the leading journal in the field of physical metallurgy worldwide. His publications have been cited by more than 6500 times and my current H-index is 42 in Scopus. He has also succeeded in obtaining fund of 5 Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects and 1 ARC Linkage Project. Dr Qiu is currently appointed as a Key Reader of ‘Metallurgical and Materials Transaction A’ and an ARC Assessor. His current research interest includes microstructure manipulation of additively manufactured (AM) metal components and new alloy development through AM.

Abstract:

Lightweight alloys, such as magnesium, aluminum, and titanium alloys, have been widely adopted as structural materials to replace high-density steels. This substitution aims to achieve weight reduction, energy savings, emission reductions, and efficiency improvements, a trend that has been widely recognized in the field of metallic materials over the past few decades. Nowadays, lightweight alloys have found extensive applications in rail transportation, automotive, and aerospace industries. However, the high energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with the smelting, purification, and manufacturing of many types of lightweight alloys have increasingly drawn attention because this might, to a large extent, offset the benefit of using lightweight alloys. It is therefore both necessary and meaningful to quantify the environmental burden — primarily in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions — over the entire lifecycle of materials to meet specific performance criteria. This presentation will explore the Materials Index approach, a widely adopted method in the sustainability community, and demonstrates how this method can be used to objectively evaluate and compare the energy consumption and carbon emissions of different candidate materials. It also evaluates the energy or CO2 savings through material substitution. Additionally, the marginal costs associated with using energy-efficient materials will be also discussed.