In this ICAM webinar, Professor Jessica A. Krogstad from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discussed the importance of harnessing evolving structure-property relationships for materials used in extreme environments.
Faced with longer service lifetimes, higher operating temperatures, more complex loading configurations, and aggressive environments, reliable operation of many key technologies hinges upon the durability of materials or material systems. In these extreme environments, understanding the evolution of material properties may be even more important than the initial performance of the material. The energy industry is ripe with extreme conditions, ranging from the chemical complexity of the carbon-based stock material to the high temperatures or pressures found during extraction, processing or use of materials.
Professor Krogstad’s research focuses on linking thermodynamic and kinetic considerations to key morphological factors in structural materials, which ultimately dictate failure mechanisms. Using the conditions relevant to the energy industry, she sets out to establish these relationships and then harness the dynamic morphologies to enhance performance. Specifically, she explored the interactions between carbonaceous materials and common structural alloys under relevant conditions.
She then focussed on the closely coupled contributions of both surface chemistry and surface morphology and then discussed strategies for mitigating deposition through surface passivation. In order to understand the underlying mechanisms for such surface passivation, she has used DC magnetron sputtering to systematically study the oxidation and microstructural evolution in a model alloy system.
Professor Krogstad concluded by discussing the potential and implications of using these nanocrystalline, thin film alloys to accelerate traditional physical metallurgy, with specific emphasis on phase transformation and mechanical degradation pathways in other extreme environments found in power generation applications.
Jessica A. Krogstad is an assistant professor in the Department of Material Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her PhD in Materials at the University of California, Santa Barbara working with Prof. Carlos G. Levi in 2012. Her doctoral work examined phase evolution and structural stability in zirconia-based thermal barrier coatings.
Between 2012 and 2014, she held a postdoctoral appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University with Prof. Kevin J. Hemker. There she focused on the investigation of high temperature metallic systems for MEMS applications and high temperature micro-mechanical testing for experimental validation of multi-scale damage models of superalloy and composite materials in the spirit of integrated computational materials engineering (ICME).
Her current research explores the interplay between phase or morphological evolution and material functionality in structural materials under extreme conditions. She is the recipient of the DOE Early Career Award, the NSF CAREER Award and the TMS Young Leaders Award.
