Topic: Light element strategy in advanced high strength steels

Speaker: Tadashi Furuhara, Professor and Deputy Director
　　　　Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, Japan

Time: 9:30-10:30, Thursday, Sep. 27, 2018

Venue: Room 249, Lee Hsun Building, IMR CAS

Welcome to attend!

Abstract：

Saving of rare metal elements for development of metals and alloys are important for sustainable development of our modern society with natural resource limits. In particular, such a concept has great impacts in research and development of advanced steels because quite high fractions of rare metal elements are spent in steel production. Under the 4Re concept ('Replace', 'Reduce', 'Recycle' and 'Restriction'), 'Element Strategy' has been one of the most important guideline in strategic research on materials science funded by Japanese government for more than 10 years. Among light elements in the periodic table, which are in general rich on the earth, interstitial elements such as carbon or nitrogen are known to be quite effective for obtaining high strength in steel. However, there are still lots of unclarified issues for interaction between interstitial elements and substitutional (mostly rare metal) elements. Deeper understanding of its fundamentals should lead to more efficient usage of rare metal elements in design of advances high strength steels.

In this talk, our recent research based on 'light element strategy' in low-alloy high strength steels is described. Two examples focusing on nano-sized precipitation are introduced: (1) microstructure controls of high strength ferritic steels with fine alloy carbide dispersion obtained by interphase precipitation, and (2) control of nano-sized alloy nitride precipitation in surface hardening design in nitrided low alloy steels. Effects of interaction of interstitial and substitutional elements on clustering/precipitation, which is a key factor for large strengthening, will be discussed.

CV - Tadashi Furuhara

I am a Professor of Microstructure Control in Structural Metallic Materials Laboratory and Head of Cooperative Research and Development Center for Advanced Materials in the Institute for Materials Research (IMR), Tohoku University, Japan. I received Ph. D. in Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science from Carnegie Mellon University, USA in 1989. I joined IMR in 2005 after research and education experiences as an assistant and associate professor in Kyoto University.

My main research area is physical metallurgy of steels and non-ferrous alloys focusing on fundamentals of phase transformations, precipitation, deformation and recrystallization as well as microstructure control by thermo-mechanical processing.
I am a member of the Japan Institute of Metals and Materials (JIM), the Iron and Steel Institute of Japan (ISIJ), the Japan Society for Heat Treatment (JSHT), the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) and ASM International (ASMI). I served as a past vice president of JIM and currently on Board of Directors as a vice president of ISIJ and also serving as an editor of Acta and Scripta Materialia.