The ASM Henry Marion Howe Medal for 2015A has been awarded to the paper “In Situ Characterization of Twin Nucleation in Pure Ti Using 3D-XRD” published in Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A by a group of researchers that includes one current and one former APS staff member as well as a former APS visiting scientist. 

Co-authors of the paper and co-recipients of the award include Thomas R. Bieler, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at Michigan State University; Leyun Wang, a materials scientist at Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht Center for Materials and Coastal Research (Germany); Armand J. Beaudoin, Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (retired); Peter Kenesei, a staff member in the APS X-ray Science Division (XSD) Materials Physics & Engineering (MPE) Group; and Ulrich Lienert, manager with Rüntgen- Ångström-Cluster, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (Germany).

The Henry Marion Howe Award was established in 1923 and is awarded in memory of a distinguished teacher, metallurgist, and consultant, to honor the author (or authors) whose paper has been selected as the best of those published in a specific volume of Metallurgical and Materials Transactions.

The research that underpins this study was carried out at XSD beamline 1-ID-C, which is operated by the MPE Group for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s APS at Argonne. Utilizing special equipment and the high-energy x-rays from the APS, the research team studied the evolution of hundreds of grains from Grade 1 commercially pure titanium. The material was monitored during tensile deformation to determine the critical stress state in parent grains before and after twin nucleation, and to assess the possibility that slip transfer (strain transfer across grain boundaries) may have stimulated twin nucleation in a manner that was observed on surface measurements on the same material. Their results revealed evidence that slip transfer is, in fact, an important mechanism for twin nucleation, and provided new information that materials designers can use in accurately modeling hexagonal materials.

Armand Beaudoin, in his email to Jon Almer, Group Leader of the MPE Group, noted that, “I was very fortunate to participate in this work as I happened to be at APS at the time of the experiment, with support from the visiting scientist program of the x-ray science division. It made this interaction with Prof. Bieler possible, and I am honored to be a part of this work.”

This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Argonne National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.