Prof. Robert Maass, an assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at University of Illinois visited the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) of Xi’an Jiaotong University (XJTU) on June 22nd. He presented his work in a talk under the title “Structural Heterogeneities in Bulk Metallic Glasses”. Faculty members as well as students of MSE attended the talk.
Monolithic bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) are emerging as a novel and highly performing class of structural materials. Since their structure is atomically disordered, BMGs are in contrast to crystalline metals generally considered to be free of internal length scales. The talk discussed structural heterogeneities that may emerge due to the application of an external bias, such as stress. In particular, time-scales and structural length-scales introduced by strain localization into shear bands. This includes the spatial structure of shear bands, how such nano-scale defects can result in long-range residual stresses, macro-scale cavitations and crack initiation, and how their residual stress signature can significantly affect the relaxation dynamics of the material.
Prof. Robert Maass briefly explained about the topic in a very friendly manner. He also told about his recent research work related to this topic. At the end of lecture students and faculty members asked questions and participated in discussion.
Profile: Robert Maass received a triple diploma in Materials Science and Engineering from the Institut National Polytechnique de Lorraine (INPL-EEIGM, France), Luleå Technical University (Sweden) and Saarland University (Germany) in 2005. In 2009, he obtained his PhD from the Materials Science Department at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. During his doctoral work, Robert designed and built an in-situ micro-compression set-up that he used to study small-scale plasticity with time-resolved Laue diffraction at the Swiss Light Source. From 2009-2011 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) on plasticity of metallic glasses. Subsequently, he joined the California Institute of Technology as an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral scholar to continue his research on plasticity of metals. After working as a specialist management consultant for metals at McKinsey & Co., he transferred to the University of Göttingen as a junior research group leader. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in 2015. Hi research interests include microstructure-property relations, size effects, strain localization and defect structures of amorphous and crystalline metals, defect dynamics, mechanical properties, microplasticity, glass transition phenomena, and test system development. His honors include the Young Scientist Award by the German Materials Society, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, the prestigious Emmy Noether award from the German Research Foundation, and the NSF Career Award.
