2025 MRS Fall Meeting & Exhibit

Symposium MF03-Additively Manufactured Functionally and Microstructurally Graded Materials

Novel materials and design paradigms are required to accommodate the extreme environments inherent to next-generation energy production, aerospace, and defense technologies. To meet design criteria such as resistance to elevated temperatures, corrosion, oxidation, or radiation, while maintaining sufficient strength, weight, and structural integrity, typically necessitates either multi-material components or materials with controlled, variable microstructures. Classical methods of joining metals typically produce interfaces and defects that cause unpredictable failure and intrinsically limit performance; similarly, legacy methods of microstructural control lack flexibility in spatial control throughout a component. Advanced manufacturing methods such as skin-pass rolling, laser peening, and additive manufacturing (AM) offer the potential to build materials with smooth gradients in composition, or functionally graded materials (FGMs), as well as microstructurally tailored or heterostructured materials, eliminating sharp, discontinuous changes in properties and maximizing benefits from each constituent material. However, these materials can be susceptible to processing defects such as porosity, and methods for precise microstructural control require refinement before they can become industrially scalable. These materials thus require more time for empirical process development than homogeneous components; consequently, graded material performance has not been validated compared to conventionally joined parts. This symposium will focus on progress made towards controlling the processing, microstructural development, properties, and performance of AM FGMs, heterostructured materials, and microstructurally tailored materials, with a particular focus on work developing our ability to predictively determine optimal compositional or processing pathways, including: thermodynamic, kinetic, property, and microstructure evolution simulations; compositional pathway selection algorithms; rapid processing; theoretical and experimental evaluation of microstructural evolution throughout processing; in situ characterization; and understanding defect formation. Research ranging from basic science to industrial applications is welcome.

Topics will include:

Defect formation and mechanisms during processing of AM FGMs or microstructural gradients
Computational platforms for selecting optimal materials systems or compositional pathways for different applications predictions
Prediction of microstructural evolution during processing or as a function of composition or local material states
Combined experimental and computational work, including validation of computational predictions
Optimization of AM FGMs for specific novel or interesting systems, such as mechanical, thermal, or other properties
Understanding of solidification, phase stability, and phase transformation in FGMs
Computational prediction of optimal material gradients and properties with minimal processing defects, such as porosity
Novel techniques and characterization methods for rapid FGM optimization

Invited Speakers:

Nesma Aboulkhair (Technology Innovation Institute, United Arab Emirates)
Mazyar Ansari (University of Waterloo, Canada)
Raymundo Arroyave (Texas A&M University, USA)
Alison Beese (The Pennsylvania State University, USA)
John Carpenter (Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA)
Jerard Gordon (University of Michigan, USA)
Grace Gu (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Wendy Gu (Stanford University, USA)
Khalid Hattar (The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA)
Cheryl Hawk (Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA)
Jonah Klemm-Toole (Colorado School of Mines, USA)
Carolin Korner (Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
Christian Leinenbach (Empa—Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Switzerland)
Tianxu Li (Taianjin University, China)
Suveen Mathaudhu (Colorado School of Mines, USA)
Soumya Nag (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA)
Richard Otis (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA)
Aurelien Perron (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA)
Julie Schoenung (University of California, Irvine, USA)
Matteo Seita (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom)
Mitra Taheri (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
Zhijiang Wang (Tianjin University, China)
Wei Xiong (University of Pittsburgh, USA)