Abstract

     This talk will briefly discuss the US Army Research Laboratory and its recent venture into the greater Chicago region, termed ARL Central. ARL Central is designed to work with partners to jointly solve the Army’s future technology needs by plugging into the talented Midwest ecosystem. Then, on to research…

Grain boundaries and interfaces play a commanding role in the bulk properties of polycrystalline materials, interacting with dislocations and/or cracks, absorbing defects and solute atoms, and moving with stress and/or temperature.  Suffice it to say that understanding the structure-property relationships of grain boundaries and interfaces in metals and ceramics is critical to designing material systems for improved properties and performance.  This presentation will introduce the different kinds of grain boundaries and interfaces in metals/ceramics and discuss some recent research thrusts to understand grain boundary/interfacial behavior, to model these grain boundaries/interfaces, and to experimentally tailor these grain boundaries/interfaces for real material systems.  The understanding of interfaces, in particular the structure-property relationships, is a key component of the “Materials-By-Design” thrust – a concept related to national initiatives to develop integrated computational material models that aim to link chemistry and processing all the way to performance, with everything in between.  The ability to model these interfaces can provide insight into material behavior at multiple scales.  This talk will focus on the many efforts to understand, model, and engineer grain boundaries in polycrystalline metals and ceramics, to include efforts (1) to sample how properties are influenced by grain boundary character, (2) to develop methods to obtain grain boundaries in simple (cubic) and complex systems, (3) to understand how grain boundary structure interacts with dislocations, point defects, solutes, and impurities, (4) to mathematically describe how shear (twinning dislocations) and shuffles impact twinning in HCP metals, (5) to engineer the thermal stability of nanocrystalline alloys via solute additions, (6) to radically improve the properties of bulk nanocrystalline parts by dispersing nanosized precipitates, and (7) to navigate the complexity in modeling grain boundaries in lightweight armor ceramics such as boron carbide.  Or, perhaps I’ll just talk about a few of these topics.

Biography

     Dr. Mark A. Tschopp is the Regional Lead for ARL Central, an extended regional campus of the US Army Research Laboratory in the greater Chicago region (including Purdue). He obtained his Ph.D. degree in materials science and engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has spent over 6 years at ARL, 4 years in casting R&D at GM Powertrain, 2 years in the Life Prediction and Behavior group (Metals branch) at the Air Force Research Laboratory, and 4 years at Mississippi State University.  He has published over 160 journal papers, book chapters, conference papers, and technical reports with around 3100 citations for the 100 peer reviewed journal papers in materials science, mechanics, computational science, and design (Google Scholar, h-factor of 32).  At present, he has presented over 130 presentations and seminars at national and international conferences, including giving over 100 invited talks/seminars.  ASM International recently selected Dr. Tschopp for the ASM Silver Medal Award, given to 1 recipient each year, presented at MS&T 2016 for “distinguished and sustained contributions in computational materials science, solid mechanics, processing-structure-property relationships, materials design for integrated computational materials engineering, and for service to ASM International.”  He is a Fellow of ASME (2017) and a Fellow of ASM (2018).   

(Google Scholar Link, ResearchGate Link)