Dr Thomas Dorin has received a prestigious Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council.
The award will provide Thomas with $407,000 over the next three years to pursue research on new classes of aluminium-magnesium-silicon alloys via scandium additions.
With the transport sector accounting for 20 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, there is much interest in lightweighting vehicles as a strategy to reduce these emissions. The use of aluminium to reduce vehicle weight offers potential to also significantly reduce emissions. Scandium can improve the performance of aluminium. This project will attempt to explain the fundamental interactions between scandium and other alloying elements in 6xxx-series aluminium alloys.
This work explores the effect of molybdenum alloying on the microstructural evolution of high-strength low-alloy strip-cast steel, which is a near-net-shape casting technology that produces thin strip material directly from the liquid metal, avoiding slab casting and hot rolling steps of conventional casting and thereby offering significant cost and energy savings. The work was part of Lu (Daniel’s) PhD research.
The article, talks about the research with CleanTeq and Universal Alloy Corporation and the potential for small amounts of scandium to have a major impact on the properties of aluminium alloys.