HKIAS News

 

Innovative findings on high entropy alloys for functional and structural applications led by the research team from the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (HKIAS) Materials Cluster at the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) were featured in prestigious scientific journals, Nature and Nature Materials.

Metals usually soften when they expand under heating, but a research team led by Professor Yong Yang from the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MNE), has discovered a first-of-its-kind super-elastic alloy that can retain its stiffness even after being heated to 1,000 K (726.85 degrees Celsius) or above, with nearly zero energy dissipation. The team believes that the alloy can be applied in manufacturing high-precision devices for space missions. Their findings were published in the latest issue of Nature, titled “A highly distorted ultraelastic chemically complex Elinvar alloy”.

Professor Yang, Professor David Joseph Srolovitz, Emeritus Senior Fellow of HKIAS (currently at the University of Hong Kong) and Professor Pao Chun-Wei from Academia Sinica are the corresponding authors of the paper. The first author is Dr. He Quanfeng from CityU's MNE (one of Professor Yang's former PhD students) and the contributing authors are Dr. Wang Jianguo from MNE (one of Professor Yang's former post-docs) and Dr. Chen Hsin-An from Academia Sinica (one of Professor Pao's former PhD students).

Also contributing to the research were Professor Chain-Tsuan Liu, Senior Fellow of HKIAS and CityU's University Distinguished Professor from the College of Engineering, Professor Ren Yang from CityU's Department of Physics, and Dr. Luan Junhua, Dr. Ding Zhaoyi, Mr. Zhou Ziqing and Dr. Jichao Qiao, all from CityU.

Other collaborators were Professor Zeng Qiaoshi from China's Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research and Professor Jean-Marc Pelletier from the University of Lyon.

In addition, another key member from the HKIAS Materials Cluster, Professor Yang Lu from CityU’s MNE, together with his PhD student, Dr. James Utama Surjadi, addressed as a critical commentary view on the framework for designing tough and damage-tolerant architected materials. Their critical commentary article was published in the latest issue of Nature Materials, titled “Design criteria for tough metamaterials”.

DOI number:
10.1038/s41586-021-04309-1
10.1038/s41563-022-01193-6

About HKIAS Materials Cluster

The HKIAS Materials Cluster (Cluster) aims to maintain and further enhance the in-depth research and mutual collaboration on Structural Materials in CityU. The Cluster is steered by HKIAS Senior Fellows and prominent scholars from CityU, all of them has an outstanding record of research achievements in Materials Science. In 2021, the Cluster offered a seed money program with a total of HK$4.9 million for 10 outstanding structural materials projects, which published over 30 research papers in prestigious scientific journals and detailing impactful discoveries.

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