Prof. LU is the vice president and professor of University of Science and Technology Beijing. He was awarded the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in 2007. He currently serves as the chief editor of international journal of Intermetallics and associate editor of a few other journals. He is also a national council member of Chinese Materials Research Society.
Prof. LU has expertise in the physical metallurgy and mechanical properties of bulk metallic glasses, high-entropy alloys and high-performance steels. His research interests are in the microstructure-property relationships of metallic materials, with special emphasis on strengthening and toughening mechanisms of ultrastrong materials facing extreme service environments. He has granted for more than 60 patents and authored more than 280 publications in peer-reviewed journals including Nature, Science, Nature Materials, etc., which were cited more than 25,000 times. His research work has garnered international recognition and been highlighted many times by Science, Nature, Nature Materials and Materials Today as a new and important development in materials science. One of his research work was selected as “the Top 10 Scientific Achievements of China” in 2017, and he is a winner of First prize in the natural science award of the Ministry of Education in 2017 and Second Prize of National Natural Science Award in 2018, and a co-winner of R&D 100 Award in 2009.
Advanced metallic materials with ultrahigh strength and large damage tolerance are urgently required in the field of aerospace, advanced transportation and nuclear energy where materials have to be exposed to most challenging environments, including extreme loading, temperatures and irradiations. However, simultaneously improving the strength and damage tolerance of the structural materialsis is extremely difficult due to the fact that the hardening media for increasing strength usually weakens the damage tolerance under various environments, especially in the ultrahigh-strength regime. In our work, a novel alloy design strategy was proposed to develop advanced high-performance metallic materials through the formation of coherent nanostructures, which interact with other crystal defects, such as dislocations, grain boundaries and irradiation defects, in an exceptional fashion. As a result, the long-standing tradeoff between the strength and damage tolerance was solved and a new grade of ultrahigh strength materials including steels and refractory high-entropy alloys with prominent mechanical properties and radiation tolerance were developed via tailoring the ordered nanostructures in different alloy matrices. The involved alloy design strategy and the underlying mechanisms responsible for the outstanding properties and unique performance behaviors will be discussed in detail.