PCEC News
GVSU Engineering Alumni Alex Plotkowski R&D 100 Award
October 06, 2022
The 2022 R&D 100 Awards winners have been announced by R&D World Magazine. This renowned worldwide science and innovation competition, celebrating its 60th year, received entries from a dozen different countries and regions. Among nine Oak Ridge National Laboratory finalists, PCEC alumnus Alex Plotkowski and his team were selected as one of the winners.
"Each day, ORNL strives to deliver scientific breakthroughs for the benefit of society," ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia said. "The R&D 100 Awards are a tremendous recognition of the hard work and dedication required by our researchers to develop these impactful technologies." This year’s wins bring ORNL’s total R&D 100 Awards to 239 since the award’s inception.
According to Oak Ridge, DuAlumin-3D is a new aluminum alloy designed to take advantage of the rapid solidification characteristics of additive manufacturing to produce a dual-strengthened microstructure, resulting in a superior combination of tensile, creep, fatigue, and corrosion properties, particularly at extreme temperatures (300°C-400°C), compared with commercial alloys. The alloy takes its name from dual strengthening mechanisms: a nanoscale microstructure that forms during printing and precipitates that form upon heat treatment. Because of these microstructural features, the alloy retains more than half its strength at high temperatures of 300 to 315 degrees Celcius and is stable up to 400 degrees Celcius.
Principal investigators for this research include ORNL’s Alex Plotkowski, GM’s Qigui Wang and Beehive3D’s Jonaaron Jones; GM’s Andy Wang, Devin Hess, Dan Wilson, and Dale Gerard; Beehive Industries’ Devon Burkle, Rachel Jones, and Charles Stansberry; and ORNL’s Amit Shyam, Ryan Dehoff, Allen Haynes, Richard Michi, Sumit Bahl, Ying Yang, Larry Allard, Jon Poplawsky, Bill Peter, Derek Splitter and Jiheon Jun. The University of Tennessee’s Kevin Sisco also contributed to the development.
View the original story posted in ORNL