Alloy Design Workshop

Dating back as early as 1500 BC, Damascus steel represents an early example of deliberately forged gradient structures in steel. These formations create distinctive patterns resembling flowing water, establishing the material’s reputation for strength, breakage resistance, and potential sharpening to a durable edge. This complexity and craftsmanship confined the technology to skilled artisans. Advancing to the present after multiple industrial revolutions, including efficient energy harnessing for machinery and precise electronic production control, diverse manufacturing techniques have emerged, rendering graded alloys more accessible. The development of metal additive manufacturing (AM) two decades ago, along with advanced surface treatment and rolling methods, has initiated a liberation attempt in the design space for graded alloys. However, this newfound freedom in graded alloy design also adds complexity to the optimization process and unlocks numerous applications beyond structural materials. The 2023 Alloy Design Workshop will explore recent advancements in varied graded alloy design and manufacturing approaches, as well as their broader applications.

Hydrogen embrittlement is a challenge for many alloy classes, in applications from infrastructure to aerospace to nuclear power. Although observations of hydrogen effects in metals date back to the 1800s, the difficulties of directly monitoring interstitial hydrogen and of elucidating the mechanisms behind embrittlement have meant that many unsolved questions remain. Today, as the energy landscape continues to evolve towards hydrogen-related technologies, new applications are placing ever-harsher demands on materials in service. Alongside this, new high-performance alloys contain increasingly complex microstructures, presenting a range of challenges and opportunities for both fundamental understanding and practical solutions. In the 2022 Alloy Design Workshop, we will discuss recent progress in mechanistic understanding of hydrogen effects, and advances in microstructural design strategies to mitigate hydrogen embrittlement.

Ever since 1791, when the British mineralogist William Gregor discovered titanium, the applications of titanium and its alloys have been extensive. Titanium alloys primarily stand out due to two properties: high specific strength and promising corrosion resistance, which as a result enable their preferential use in aerospace sectors, chemical industry, and medical engineering. In response to these practical demands, research in titanium alloys is vibrant and covers almost all aspects of physical metallurgy. These efforts are further motivated by the progress in advanced processing approaches, sub-angstrom scale characterization techniques, and physics-based modeling methods, jointly leading to exciting microstructural design strategies. In the Alloy Design 2021 Workshop, we will discuss the most recent advancement in the science and technology of titanium alloys, aiming to extend the frontiers of titanium alloy design.

Steels are by far the most commonly used structural alloys: worldwide, steel production reached 1808 million tons in 2018, which is more than all other metal production combined. Steels form the basis of the infrastructure of our most critical industries, from construction to automotive, packaging and energy. However, as a result, steel production and use also create the strongest impact on environment. Design efforts that enable steels to do more, with less, for longer, are required to address this challenge. To this end, an important concern is damage-susceptibility, which arises from the presence of multiple phases in steels, with different mechanical characteristics. Several opportunities exist through alloy and microstructure design, to control strain partitioning and localization tendencies in steels, and in turn, the damage micro-mechanisms. In this regard, metastability-assisted steels provide the greatest spectrum of possibilities, but also, the most complex scientific challenges. In the Alloy Design 2020 workshop, we will discuss the most recent ideas to push the limits of metastability-engineering, towards steels with superior damage resistance.

The last two decades witnessed the development of several micro- and nano-mechanical testing techniques. Simultaneously, there have been tremendous developments in electron microscopy detector technologies, full-field mapping techniques, and data analytics algorithms. These new tools and methods provide new insights regarding the mechanical behavior of metals. Initially, the research focus has specifically been on the fundamental mechanisms of plasticity, damage and fracture; and the role of size effects therein. More recently, more complex alloys with multiple phases, gradient structures or compositions, and hierarchical microstructures have also been explored with these tremendously improved tools. The fundamental question we would like to discuss in Alloy Design 2019 is whether it is possible to bridge the gap between the scales, utilizing what we learn at the nano- and micro-scale to guide alloy and microstructure design.

There is tremendous interest in the development of new metallic materials with improved property combinations. Fortunately, an enormous portion of the compositional space of metallic materials is virtually unexplored. In the last decade, introduction of compositionally-complex and high-entropy alloys created a widespread effort to explore this space more efficiently. Such efforts are further motivated by the development of additive manufacturing, severe plastic deformation, incremental forming and other advanced processing methods, which enable various new microstructures. This vastly-increased degree of freedom in metals design, calls for new guidelines. This workshop aims to initiate discussions on new approaches developed for this purpose. Presentations delivered by leading researchers in the field will follow this focused theme, covering a wide scope of approaches ranging from atomistic simulations to high-throughput combinatorial metallurgy methods.

Metallic materials have enabled the vast majority of the key technological advances of the history of humankind. Going forward, our understanding of alloy design has the potential to help tackle critical sustainability challenges, by designing lighter-weight steels, formable magnesium alloys, fatigue-resistant aluminum alloys, repairable superalloys, and others. Yet, what is urgently needed is a comprehensive overview of the most urgent scientific questions in the design of metallic materials, to help orchestrate present efforts to address the most critical sustainability challenges. This focused workshop aims to identify the most important sustainability challenges and opportunities for each key metallic material, and discuss corresponding scientific research  questions and current findings in a Gordon Conference style meeting. To trigger material specific discussions, world leading experts are invited to deliver overview talks on different classes of metallic materials. The presenters are invited also to join in as co-authors to a joint overview manuscript on alloy design, to be published in Progress in Materials Science.