- Senior Research Fellowship in 2022 at University of Hong Kong
About Mingxin Huang’s work
Mingxin Huang’s research is focused on physical metallurgy and the development of novel lightweight metals and alloys that have potential applications in automotive and aviation industries and could reduce our reliance on rare-earth elements.
Although rare-earth elements are effective for developing strong, ductile Mg alloys, their use is unsustainable as rare-earth elements are rare natural resources. Prof Huang is working to develop low-cost, strong, ductile Mg alloys without the addition of rare-earth elements.
Huang is establishing a methodology by combining density functional theory (DFT) and machine learning, namely, the DFT-guided ML method. DFT calculations will be performed to obtain the stacking fault energy (SFE) of various Mg alloys. Then, machine learning is used to identify the most promising non-rare-earth alloying elements that can enhance the activity of dislocations. Only low-cost and non-toxic elements are considered. Dislocation engineering will be employed to further improve the density of dislocations via warm rolling. The pre-induced dislocations by warm rolling can improve the strength while keeping the ductility. The resulting alloys could reduce our reliance on rare-earth elements.
Biography
Mingxin Huang is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Hong Kong. He earned his PhD in Materials Science at Delft University of Technology, and his MSc and BEng at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.