Luo honored for material design scholarship

Alan A. Luo, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University, has been recognized for outstanding scholarship in the field of new material design methodology. He was honored at a recent international computational thermodynamics and materials conference in Japan for his outstanding contributions to new material design methodology.

Luo’s paper, titled “Material Design and Development: from Classical Thermodynamics to CALPHAD and ICME Approaches”, published in CALPHAD: Computer Coupling of Phase Diagrams and Thermochemistry, was recognized as the most outstanding paper published in 2015. In the paper, Luo provided an overview and examples of material design and development using classical thermodynamics; calculation of phase diagrams modeling (CALPHAD); and integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) approaches.

“Materials have paced the evolution of technology for millennia,” Luo said. “In the last few decades, the discovery and development of new materials have gradually migrated from meticulous experimental exploration using ‘trial-and-error’ and ‘design of experiments’ methods to material design approaches based on thermodynamics and kinetics.”

Contemporary work using CALPHAD and ICME tools has accelerated the design and development of new alloys.

“Advanced light metals like aluminum, magnesium and titanium alloys are increasingly being used in the automotive, aerospace and consumer industries for weight reduction and structural efficiency,” Luo said. His paper described a number of current success stories and mapped the evolution of these new design processes.

CALPHAD is known for promoting computational thermodynamics through development of models to represent thermodynamic properties for various phases which permit prediction of properties of multicomponent systems from those of binary and ternary subsystems, critical assessment of data and their incorporation into self-consistent databases, development of software to optimize and derive thermodynamic parameters and the development and use of databanks for calculations to improve understanding of various industrial and technological processes.