Best in show: (from left) Megumi Kawasaki, Terry Langdon and Cheng Xu.

When a best-presentations winners envelope was opened at the annual meeting of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) in San Antonio, researchers from USC Viterbi School Prof. Terry Langdon’s group had taken the top two honors in their category.

The TMS meeting included the Fourth International Symposium on Ultra Fine Grain materials, at which researchers presented more than 120 papers on “on all aspects of science and technology of ultrafine-grained (UFG) materials produced by Severe Plastic Deformation (SPD) techniques.”

 

 

Such materials — new structures for familiar metals like aluminum — are attracting intense research attention worldwide because of their remarkable properties compared to the familiar coarser-grained forms, including extraordinary strength and hardness. Langdon's lab  is a center of research in the area, and its latest studies attracted attention at the symposium.

 

Judged best oral presentation was  “Creep Behavior of an Al-7034 Alloy Processed by ECAP,” by post-doctoral student Cheng Xu and Langdon, presented by Xu.

   The runner-up was “The Significance of Cavitation in a Superplastic Aluminum Alloy Processed by ECAP,” by Xu, Langdon and graduate student Megumi Kawasaki, presented by Kawasaki.  “I was so surprised we both got awards,”she said.
(“ECAP,”or Equal-Channel Angular  Pressing”  is a new technique used break down crystalline structures in metals, creating materials with new and useful properties.)

Langdon, who has been at USC since 1971, holds appointments  in the Viterbi Department of Aerospance and Mechanical  Engineering, the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science , and the  College of Letters, Arts and Sciences' Department of  Earth Science. In 2003, he was appointed to the William E. Leonhard chair of Engineering.