Materials Science of Steels
Materials Science of Steels: Hongcai Wang earned his bachelor degree from the North Eastern University in Shenyang, China. He then went to Japan, where he received his master degree from the University of Technology of Toyohashi, where he worked on high-pressure torsion. He was selected as one of the international doctoral students of the International Max Planck Research School SurMat. In his PhD thesis, he tackled open questions related to the role of boron in steels. Since 2016, his group has been studying microstructural evolution in steels, using advanced scale-bridging characterization methods to study elementary processes governing the evolution of microstructures during thermo-mechanical treatments. He interprets his experimental findings using the thermodynamic and kinetic simulation programs MatCalc and ThermoCalc.
Hongcai Wang is responsible for an industrial project, in which the focus is on the evolution of particle populations in thick section plates. By optimizing alloy composition and thermo-mechanical heat treatments, he aims at increasing the strength of low-alloyed steels and, at the same time, providing good toughness. Toward the end of the reporting period, Hongcai Wang also started to work with scientists from the collaborative research center SFB/TR 103 to apply TEM techniques to the characterization of single crystal Ni-base superalloys.