Professors Dallas Trinkle and Harrison Kim (ISE) have received U.S. Department of Energy awards as part of a multi-million-dollar project led by the University of Florida.
“The over-arching DOE project is aimed at designing processing routes for metal alloys that use magnetic fields to reduce the energy necessary and costs in making structure alloys (specifically, steels). The impact of this would be reduction in energy needed to make widely used structural materials,” Trinkle said.
Trinkle’s part is to use his computational and theoretical methods for diffusion to understand and predict how atoms move at the atomic scale in the presence of magnetic fields. Trinkle and Kim’s calculations will be used to suggest alloy chemistry that can maximize the reduction in energy necessary for processing under magnetic fields.
Dallas R. Trinkle is a Willett Faculty Scholar and Professor and Associate Head of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on computational methods for studying defects in materials at the atomic-scale using density-functional theory and novel techniques to understand problems in mechanical behavior and transport.
The award is part of a $187 million effort to strengthen U.S. manufacturing competitiveness, granting 55 projects spread throughout 25 states.