Materials Beyond Limits: Multiscale Mechanics, Additive Manufacturing, and AI Enabled Discovery for Extreme Environments

Materials operating in aerospace, energy, electronic, and space systems must withstand coupled extremes of temperature, stress, strain rate, irradiation, corrosive environments, and cyclic loading while remaining manufacturable, repairable, and resource-efficient. Meeting this challenge requires a research framework that connects mechanism-level understanding with scalable processing and data-guided decision-making. This seminar presents Dr. Zou’s “4M” approach—metals, mechanics, manufacturing, and machine learning—to engineer materials across length and time scales. First, he will show how micro- and nanomechanical experiments reveal deformation and failure mechanisms in metallic and semiconductor materials. Second, Dr. Zou will discuss how laser-based additive manufacturing and cold spray create compositions, microstructures, and component architectures that are difficult to achieve through conventional processing. Examples in titanium alloys, high-entropy alloys, and multimaterials illustrate how process physics, defects, residual stress, and interfaces govern component-scale performance. Third, he will describe machine-learning strategies for alloy design, microstructure analysis, process monitoring, and optimization. Building on these foundations, Dr. Zou will outline a research vision for extreme terrestrial and space sustainability: autonomous, closed-loop platforms that integrate high-throughput synthesis, multimodal characterization, mechanistic models, uncertainty-aware learning, and targeted testing. The goal is not simply faster screening, but traceable discovery and qualification of materials that retain performance under extreme conditions.