Professor Pascal Bellon – Self-Organized Metallic Alloys for Wear Applications

Professor Pascal Bellon, the Donald W. Hamer Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, delivered the fifth ICAM webinar of 2017 on the topic of self-organized metallic alloys for wear applications.

Materials are commonly subjected to plastic deformation, in particular during their fabrication and shaping, and in service. This plastic deformation can alter the phase stability in these materials, and thus modify their properties, often in a detrimental way.

Professor Bellon’s research at Illinois has shown however that alloys subjected to severe plastic deformation display a general tendency to self-organize at the nanoscale. This self-organization, which results from a competition between kinetic processes with distinct characteristic length scales, offers a novel path for designing materials that can adapt to harsh service environments. In some cases, the performances of these materials can even improve through these self-organization reactions.

In this webinar, Professor Bellon briefly reviewed the principles at the origin of these self-organization reactions. He then provided some illustrative examples for the case of alloys processed by ball milling and high-pressure torsion, and for the case of alloys subjected to sliding wear. Professor Bellon showed that a spontaneous formation of nanolayers can be used to design materials with much improved sliding wear resistance.

Professor Pascal Bellon earned a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Paris 6, France. He is currently the Donald W. Hamer Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

His research focuses on materials driven far from equilibrium, such as those subjected to irradiation and severe plastic deformation, and how to use self-organization reactions in these driven systems to design damage resistant materials.