MSE Colloquium: Y. Norman Zhou, Welding and Joining Research at the University of Waterloo

Director, Centre for Advanced Materials Joining, University of Waterloo, Canada

All dates for this event occur in the past.

264 MacQuigg Labs
105 W. Woodruff Ave.
Columbus, OH 43210
United States

Abstract

The University of Waterloo has been active in welding and joining research and education for several decades. We have an undergraduate specialization program in Welding and Joining, the only one in Canada, which graduates about 15 students a year. The research and study areas include welding processes and metallurgy, fracture and fatigue, and process monitoring and control. We are currently working with more than a dozen companies from varied industries, such as automotive, pipelines, microelectronics and medical implants.    

This presentation will start with an overview of the welding research and education activities at the University of Waterloo and follow with a number of the current research topics from our Centre. The first group of topics includes the formability of tailor welded blanks of advanced high strength steels, Zn vaporization issue in laser lap welding of Zn-coated sheet steels, grain refinement in resistance spot welding of Mg alloys, and wettability in laser brazing of Mg to steel for automotive applications.  The second grouping encompasses the areas of microjoining and nanojoining, especially a topic on welding of shape memory alloys for medical application and how this research work triggered a recent technology innovation – Smarter Alloys. This new technology can program complex functionality into SMAs, which have previously been only capable of primitive functionality, resulting in substantial reductions to the size, weight and cost of devices, structures and machines. 

Bio

Dr. Y. (Norman) Zhou received his BASc and MASc from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and PhD from the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. He worked as a Lecturer at Tsinghua University and as a Materials Scientist at Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd, Chalk River, Ontario, Canada. He also worked as a Senior Research Engineer at the Edison Welding Institute, Columbus, Ohio, USA.  

Dr. Zhou is Professor and Director of the Centre for Advanced Materials Joining, University of Waterloo, and also University Research Chair at Waterloo. His research interests cover welding and joining, nanomaterials fabrication, and laser processing of shape memory alloys. Dr. Zhou has authored or co-authored over 230 refereed journal papers and several books, including “Microjoining and Nanojoining” and “Joining and Assembly of Medical Materials and Devices”. He is an IWE and PEng, and also a fellow of ASM International. Dr. Zhou has been serving at the editorial boards of Metallurgical and Materials Transactions, Acta Metallurgica Sinica (English Letters) and Nano-Micro Letters. He is co-founder of SmarterAlloys.com.