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Materials for extreme environments

Nature Reviews Materials volume 8, pages 81–88 (2023)Cite this article

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Materials for extreme environments can help to protect people, structures and the planet. Extreme temperatures in aeroplane engines, hypervelocity micrometeoroid impacts on satellites, high-speed machining of ceramics and strong radiation doses in nuclear reactors are just some examples of extreme conditions that materials need to withstand. In this Viewpoint, experts working on materials for different types of extreme environments discuss the most exciting advances, opportunities and bottlenecks in their fields.

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Fig. 1: Examples of extreme environments.

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Acknowledgements

S.E.P. acknowledges discussions and suggestions for the full Viewpoint from K. T. Ramesh of Johns Hopkins University (JHU), T. Weihs (JHU), D. Mallick of the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), A. Peters (JHU), C. Williams (ARL), J. T. Lloyd (ARL) and S. Ravindran (Caltech). S.E.P. also acknowledges support from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Engineering Excellence Fellowship from the MIT School of Engineering, and interactions with members of the Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environments consortium supported by ARL Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-12-2-0022 and Artificial Intelligence for Materials Design programme sponsored by ARL Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-22-2-0014. T.M.P. acknowledges the support of a Department of Defense Vannevar Bush Fellowship, grant N00014-18-1-3031. M.A.M. thanks colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (B. A. Remington, H. S. Park, C. Wehrenberg and R. Rudd) and students at the University of California San Diego (S. Zhao, Z. Li, G. Righi, A. Li and B. Li) for their work. The UCSD work is supported by the Center for Matter under Extreme Conditions through the US Department of Energy (National Nuclear Security Administration). A.A. acknowledges the support provided by the joint appointment with Idaho National Laboratory as part of the US Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy under DOE Idaho Operations Office Contract DE-AC07-051D14517. Z.C.C. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation through project number NSF-DMR-2004913, as well as discussions with colleagues and collaborators from the launch industry. K.-L.C. acknowledges funding from the Department of Defense, Defense Threat Reduction Agency under award HDTRA1-20-2-0001. The content of the information does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the federal government, and no official endorsement should be inferred. L.G.-B. acknowledges funding from ARL under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-22-2-0014.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Suhas Eswarappa Prameela

  2. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Suhas Eswarappa Prameela & Zachary C. Cordero

  3. Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Suhas Eswarappa Prameela & Lori Graham-Brady

  4. Materials Department, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Tresa M. Pollock

  5. Microstructure Physics and Alloy Design, Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Dierk Raabe

  6. Materials Science and Engineering Program, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Marc André Meyers

  7. Nuclear Engineering Program, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Assel Aitkaliyeva

  8. Otto H. York Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA

    Kerri-Lee Chintersingh

  9. Department of Civil and Systems Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Lori Graham-Brady

Authors
  1. Suhas Eswarappa Prameela
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  5. Assel Aitkaliyeva
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  7. Zachary C. Cordero
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  8. Lori Graham-Brady
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Suhas Eswarappa Prameela, Tresa M. Pollock, Dierk Raabe, Marc André Meyers, Assel Aitkaliyeva, Kerri-Lee Chintersingh, Zachary C. Cordero or Lori Graham-Brady.

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The contributors

Suhas Eswarappa Prameela is currently the MIT Engineering Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow, jointly affiliated with the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a visiting scholar at Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests span high-throughput materials discovery for extreme environments, mechanical behaviour across length scales and timescales, metallurgy, propulsion materials, metal additive manufacturing and materials informatics.

Tresa M. Pollock is the Alcoa Distinguished Chair of Materials at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the mechanical and environmental performance of materials in extreme environments, unique high-temperature materials processing paths, ultrafast laser–material interactions, alloy design and 3D materials characterization. She is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the Germany Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and Editor in Chief of Metallurgical and Materials Transactions.

Dierk Raabe studied music, metallurgy and metal physics. Since 1999 he has been a director at the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung, and he is a professor at RWTH Aachen and at KU Leuven. His interests are in computational materials science, sustainable metallurgy, alloy design, hydrogen and atom probe tomography. He is a member of the Germany Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Marc André Meyers is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California San Diego. His research interests are the dynamic behaviour of materials, including dynamic synthesis and processing, the deformation of nanocrystalline materials and the mechanical behaviour of biological materials. The author of four books and hundreds of papers, he also writes fiction and is a fellow of the Explorers Club.

Assel Aitkaliyeva is an associate professor of Nuclear Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Florida. Her research interests lie in the area of radiation effects in materials, nuclear fuels, and the stability of low-dimensional materials in extreme radiation environments.

Kerri-Lee Chintersingh is an assistant professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and a former process control engineer from Jamaica. Her current research focuses on developing, characterizing and testing materials for combustion, environmental and catalytic applications, and tuning powders for reactions, improved mixing and consolidation. She is also interested in the use of machine learning for anomaly detection and data mining to accelerate material design and to improve the understanding of complex mechanisms in extreme environments.

Zachary C. Cordero is the Boeing Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he leads the Aerospace Materials and Structures Laboratory. His current research is focused on the design, processing and performance of new materials tailored to withstand the extreme operating conditions in reusable liquid-propellant rocket engines.

Lori Graham-Brady is a professor of Civil and Systems Engineering and Associate Director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests are in probabilistic mechanics, uncertainty propagation and machine learning/surrogate modelling for solid mechanics applications. She is also overseeing the development of an integrated laboratory on Artificial Intelligence for Materials Design, with a specific focus on high-throughput techniques, automation and testing specifically in high-rate/high-temperature/high-pressure conditions.

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Eswarappa Prameela, S., Pollock, T.M., Raabe, D. et al. Materials for extreme environments. Nat Rev Mater 8, 81–88 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-022-00496-z

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