Latest News

2024/09/27: We’re excited to join ARPA-E’s CHADWICK program in tackling one of the biggest hurdles in commercial fusion energy: developing advanced materials that can withstand the extreme environment inside fusion reactors. This is a huge step toward commercializing fusion energy and unlocking clean, limitless power. Learn more: https://arpa-e.energy.gov/news-and-media/press-releases

2024/06/28: We presented our latest work in the context of the first Past Metallurgists Society conference in Cambridge, UK. This very clever concept is initiated by Professors Matteo Seita and Mengying Liu. Thanks so much for the invitation!

2024/06/03: Marie is ranked amongst the teachers listed as excellent by their students for her new course MSE 441 Metals Processing. This recognition is much appreciated after restructuring the course from scratch and we hope to offer it again in Spring 2025!

2024/05/28: Our newest article is available in Acta Materialia! We demonstrate that it is possible to obtain twin boundaries in as-built additive manufactured stainless steels, through two peculiar mechanisms. Both of them leverage metastable delta ferrite, that forms at high temperature. One arises from a solid-state phase transformation while the other operates directly in the liquid via Icosahedral Short Range Ordering (ISRO)-induced nucleation. Kudos to Jackson and Yen-Ting for their beautiful microscopy work and resilience! read it here.

2024/05/01: Our new article is available in npj Materials Degradation. Using 3D FIB tomography, we reveal the origins of the intricate corrosion damage in AM stainless steels and the central role of sub-grain structures in determining its crystallographic dependence. Read it in open access here: Metastable cellular structures govern localized corrosion damage development in additive manufactured stainless steel | npj Materials Degradation (nature.com) Right in time for Evan’s graduation!

2024/04/16: Mia was awarded a DaRin Butz Foundation scholarship to continue her research on novel copper alloys for AM in our group this Fall, congratulations!!

2024/03/18: Our group had a successful TMS meeting in Orlando with five contributed talks on additive manufacturing, microstructure engineering, and how we use it to tune mechanical properties.

2024/02/01: Jackson passes both his qualification exams and is now officially a PhD candidate, congratulations!

2024/01/15: Nabila Ali, PhD candidate, joins the group, welcome!

2023/09/11: New video by UIUC’s Grainger College of Engineering featuring our efforts in alloy design for additive manufacturing.

2023/09/10: Yen-Ting passes his qualification exams and is now officially a PhD candidate, congratulations!

2023/09/10: Our new article shows how we can tailor and spatially engineer grain boundary topology via functional grading of stainless steels. Read it here

2023/08/15: Mia Mikolacjak, brilliant MatSE undergraduate, joins the group, welcome!

2023/04/26: Tiffany’s efforts in DEI honored with a DOW Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Undergraduate Student Award, congratulations!

2023/04/26: We are proud to support UIUC’s team in the TMS BladeSmithing competition! Read the department’s communications here and here. Go Abby and Kira!

2023/04/26: End of the year awards! Marie is on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students for MSE 406 – Thermal

2023/03/28: Great time at the AEM2023 workshop hosted by LLNL!

2023/02/26: Our new Acta Materialia article available here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359645423001325

2023/02/10: Marie’s recent MaterialsAZ talk is available on Youtube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCZOgtKC48U

2023/02/03: Marie’s interview for the Energy and Biosciences Institute is available on Youtube . She discusses challenges in hydrogen storage, mechanical testing at cryogenic temperature, and how alloy design and additive manufacturing can help making the hydrogen supply chain a reality. We are grateful to EBI for the opportunity to discuss our research.

2023/01/27: We just finished setting up our Directed Energy Deposition system from Formalloy and started printing!

2023/01/26: New article available in Materials Characterization with colleagues from UCSB: Dislocation cells in additively manufactured metallic alloys characterized by electron backscatter diffraction pattern sharpness, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matchar.2023.112673 

2022/12/19: CAREER award in the news 

2022/12/05: Marie receives her CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for “Recrystallization in Additive Manufactured Metallic Materials“. With this award, we will develop new electron microscopy techniques and metrics for quantitative characterization of AM microstructures to better understand the fundamental mechanisms of recrystallization in AM materials and their driving forces.

2022/11/14: Happy to have supported microstructure characterization efforts related to the development of this exciting recrystallization technique, featured in MIT news article.

2022/11/12: New article in Computational Materials Science. We use graphs to represent microstructures and neural networks to predict their mechanical properties. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.commatsci.2022.111894

2022/11/11: New article in Additive Manufacturing on Directional recrystallization in AM superalloys with colleagues from MIT. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addma.2022.103198

2022/11/07: New article in Acta Materialia on geometrically necessary dislocations, in three dimensions, with colleagues from UCSB. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actamat.2022.118366

2022/10/02: New article on plasticity in LPBF 316L stainless steel published in International Journal of Plasticity https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749641922002145

2022/09/19: New Science article featured in new Illinois News Bureau post

2022/09/02: New article published in Science! On the origins of fatigue strength in crystalline metallic materials https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn0392

2022/08/15: Yen-Ting Chang, Jackson Nie, and Evan DelVecchio join the group, welcome all!

2022/08/07: Our new article is out and it has the prettiest 3D microstructure renderings. Check it out here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01525-w

2022/05/27: Our new article on the peculiar plastic localization behavior of the HfNbTaTiZr high entropy alloy (‘Senkov alloy’) is published. Check it out here!

2022/05/13: Hooding time for Dr. Rizzardi!

2022/05/10: Abhi Sharda was awarded an Ian and Victoria Robertson Scholarship!

2022/05/10: Maria Liset Castellanos was awarded a Larry D. and Carol Rakers Scholarship! see post on the department’s website.

2022/04/14: Quentin Rizzardi wins Racheff-Intel award, congratulations !! He will present his work at our final colloquium of the year along with other recipients on May 2nd at 4pm, MSEB room 100.

2022/03/2022: Quentin Rizzardi brilliantly defended his thesis and now goes by Dr. Rizzardi. Congratulations!

2022/01/12: M.A. Charpagne will give an invited talk at the Colorado School of Mines on March 3rd 2022.

2022/01/11: M.A. Charpagne will give an invited talk at the Royal Microscopical Society EBSD conference in April 2022: RMS | Virtual EBSD 2022

2021/12/19: M.A. Charpagne gives an invited talk at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

2021/12/13: M.A. Charpagne gives an invited talk at the Krakow EBSD 2021 conference: link

2021/11/04: Tiffany Liu (freshman) joins the group, welcome!

2021/11/01: M.A. Charpagne’s paper on multi-modal data merging for visualization of slip bands in three dimensions is the Editor’s choice in the November edition of JOM. Read the article here: A Multi-modal Data Merging Framework for Correlative Investigation of Strain Localization in Three Dimensions | SpringerLink

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2021/10/01: Abhi Sharda (junior undergraduate student) joins the group, welcome!

2021/08/16: Sydney Johnson (grad student) and Mukundan Anugrahaprada (MS student) join the group, welcome!

2021/08/25: M.A. Charpagne will give a Hard Materials Seminar in MSEB on Sept 2nd on ‘Accelerating the optimization of metallic materials using correlative measurements in electron microscopy‘, all info here