In the saline-rich waters of the sea, corrosion is an engineer’s enemy.
To help combat this, Dr. Marcelo Paredes has been working on materials modeling — especially for engineering materials widely used by automotive, offshore and nuclear industries — and researching how corrosion affects high entropy alloys (HEAs).
“The corrosion resistance of metallic materials has always been a critical aspect in safety and design protocols for marine infrastructures,” Paredes said. “This study is widespread in many areas of knowledge, such as materials science, chemistry, mechanical engineering, etc., with important contributions toward its full understanding. Despite those efforts, still very little is known about corrosion-resistance properties of HEAs.”
As Paredes explained, HEAs — alloys formed by mixing equal or relatively large proportions of five or more elements — offer new opportunities in engineering areas due to their enhanced qualities.
In an international and multidisciplinary effort to better understand the corrosion process and design two distinct corrosion-resistant HEAs, Paredes has teamed up with researchers from the National Corrosion and Materials Reliability Lab in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Dr. Pradeep Konda from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. They hope to understand how corrosion influences various mechanisms of deformation at different acidity levels and loading modes.
The materials’ mechanical behavior will be analyzed at Texas A&M. The materials’ phase formation, stability and evolution will be examined — down to near-atomic resolutions — at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
“I believe that tackling this challenging problem of materials design is a very productive joint cooperation that could be established to explore the potentials of HEA as next-generation materials for engineering applications in aggressive environments,” Paredes said.
FEATURED RESEARCHER