MMAE Seminar - Dr. James Saal - ICME Design of High Entropy Alloys for High-Temperature Applications

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John T. Rettaliata Engineering Center, Room 104, 10 West 32nd Street, Chicago, IL 60616
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Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical, Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Doctor James Saal, QuesTek Innovations, on Wednesday, April 20th to present his lecture, ICME Design of High Entropy Alloys for High-Temperature Applications.

Abstract

High entropy alloys (HEAs) are a recently discovered class of materials that consist of a single-phase disordered solid solution of five or more components at or near equi-atomic composition. HEAs are stabilized at high temperature by their configurational entropy and have exhibited high strength and low plasticity at elevated temperatures. For these reasons, HEAs have the potential to dramatically surpass traditional alloys across a range of high-temperature, demanding applications. QuesTek Innovations is employing integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) methods to accelerate development of HEA designs for practical applications, particularly turbine blades. I will report on progress of HEA ICME tool development, including high-throughput ab-initio calculations and CALPHAD thermodynamic databases.

Biography

James Saal, Ph.D., specializes in thermodynamic CALPHAD modeling and ab-initio prediction of thermodynamic and kinetic properties with density functional theory (DFT). Dr. Saal is a technical lead on many of QuesTek's programs, guiding model and database construction and materials design activities for structural alloys and functional ceramics. He is also responsible for new program development, interfacing extensively with government agencies, research institutions, and industry. Before joining QuesTek in 2014, Dr. Saal worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University, employing DFT to study precipitation in Mg and Co alloys and design novel precipitate alloy systems. At Northwestern, he also helped develop the Open Quantum Materials Database (OQMD), a high-throughput DFT database of crystal stabilities openly available. During his Ph.D. Dr. Saal constructed CALPHAD databases for a variety of metal alloy, refractory, and ceramic oxide systems. His work employed DFT thermodynamics to enable the CALPHAD modeling of materials systems to address critical materials issues.