Decarbonizing Metallurgy from Extraction to 3D Printing

Metals are critical to technology, but their supply chain includes antiquated techniques with large carbon emissions. A sustainable economy requires new science to connect science to engineering needs across the supply chain - from metal extraction to part fabrication. My group uses and develops advanced characterization techniques to study the science underlying barriers to decarbonize today’s technology. In this talk, I will introduce our work at the earliest and latest parts of the supply chain. I will begin my talk explaining our work studying approaches for sustainable metals extraction, including approaches to develop and scale technologies to decarbonize steelmaking and approaches to create new extraction methods for rare earth elements. I will then turn to the critical challenges of making efficient parts to reduce the energy of vehicles and machines. Metal 3D printing is revolutionizing technology, as its layer-by-layer fabrication that can fabricate parts with strength-to-weight ratios not possible otherwise. However, the defects and structural properties from printed parts are highly variable due to the poorly understood evolution of defects at many scales. I will share my group’s work developing models to understand defects of a few types during metal 3D printing, enabled by synchrotron and new XFEL techniques we developed to directly measure those dynamics in real time. This view of science across the supply chain illustrates the important science opportunities for metallurgy to offer unique insights for a sustainable future.

Speaker: Leora Dresselhaus-Marais, Stanford University

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