Creating new materials to promote sustainability

by Taylor Villanueva

In the push for more sustainable, efficient ways to advance science and technology, materials engineering holds the key to creating new materials that can push development forward. Creating a new material starts with a problem and a question: How can we fix an existing issue, or how can we improve a solution that is already in place?

In Materials Engineering Professor Mohsen Kivy’s case, he decided to study high-entropy alloys, a class of multicomponent metallic alloys that are relatively new and have attracted interest due to their unique properties.

“I had a project that a few of our students were working on,” Kivy shared. “It was computational and experimental. They were doing simulations to predict results, then conducted the experiment to confirm their simulation results.”

Under the guidance and curiosity of Kivy, materials engineering students Ryan Thompson, Juan Palominos Jr., Matthew Kestenbaum and Lucy Hunter tested the crystallization of high-entropy alloys at different temperatures. Their goal was to discover a new alloy that would be stronger than traditional alloys.

The group used density functional theory (a quantum mechanical modeling) and the software package CALculation of PHAse Diagrams, or CALPHAD, to examine the crystal structure of the material.

“We wanted to see what kind of crystal structure the materials would form if we wanted to cast this alloy,” Kivy said. “Then we took it a step further — What if we changed the temperature? What kind of crystal structures would form at different temperatures?”

Thompson, Palominos Jr., Kestenbaum and Hunter comprised their research into a poster and presented the findings at the Materials Science & Technology (MS&T) Technical Meeting and Exhibition in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, last October.

The former second- and third-year undergraduate students shared their research among their peers of graduate students and Ph.D. candidates.

“The students did a great job presenting their poster,” Kivy shared. “It resulted in a lot of consultation and collaborations, some of which are ongoing.”

But the work didn’t stop there.

“We continued that project with the same students and published in a journal explaining our discoveries,” Kivy said.

The article, Experimental and Computational Study of Microstructure of Al2FeCoNiCu High-Entropy Alloy, was published this year in the Journal of Phase Equilibria and Diffusion.

In addition to his research on alloys, Kivy is also focusing on a way to prolong the shelf life of food products and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere. The process involves encapsulation of different compounds in metal-organic frameworks. Kivy and his colleagues have published three papers on the research. n