Brian Cantor

Title : Multicomponent high-entropy cantor alloys

Abstract:

All human advances have depended on making new materials, and all materials are alloys, i.e. mixtures of several different starting materials or components.  So the history of the human race has been the continued invention of new materials by discovering new alloys.  Recently a new way of doing this, by manufacturing multicomponent high-entropy alloys, has shown that the total number of possible materials is enormous, even more than the number of atoms in the galaxy, so we have lots of wonderful new materials yet to find.  And multicomponent phase space contains a surprisingly large number of extended solid solutions.  The first group of these which was discovered are called Cantor alloys, an enormous composition range with a single-phase fcc structure, based loosely on the original equiatomic five-component Cantor alloy CrMnFeCoNi.  This talk will discuss the previous history of alloying, the discovery of multicomponent alloys, the structure of multicomponent phase space, the fundamental thermodynamics of multicomponent solid solutions such as the Cantor alloys, the complexity of local atomic and nanoscale configurations in such materials, the effect of this on properties such as atomic diffusion, dislocation slip, and the resulting outstanding mechanical properties and potential applications, including at low and high temperatures, for corrosion and radiation resistance, and to enhance recycling and re-use.

Biography:

Brian Cantor is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford and a Research Professor in the Brunel Centre for Advanced Solidification Technology at Brunel University.  He was previously Vice-Chancellor of the University of York and of Bradford University, Head of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Oxford, a research scientist and engineer at General Electric Research Labs in the USA, and worked briefly at Banaras Hindu University, Washington State, Northeastern, IISc Bangalore and the Kobe Institute.  He founded and built up the World Technology Universities Network, the UK National Science Learning Centre, the Hull-York Medical School, and Oxford’s Begbroke Science Park.  He was a long-standing consultant for Alcan, NASA and Rolls-Royce, and editor of Progress in Materials Science.  He invented the new field of multicomponent high-entropy alloys and discovered the so-called Cantor alloys.