Car manufacturers could soon replace heavy steel and aluminium parts with magnesium alloys that are strong, rust-resistant, and cheap to produce—if a new approach to alloy design works. The problem is that magnesium is currently too expensive, too difficult to shape, and corrodes too quickly for widespread use in cars. Today, magnesium makes up only about 1 percent of a typical vehicle’s weight, even though it is 75 percent lighter than steel and 33 percent lighter than aluminium. Reducing a car’s weight by 50 kilograms cuts CO₂ emissions by up to 5 grams per kilometre and improves fuel economy by 2 percent. The fellowship aims to solve the long-standing trade-off between strength, formability, and corrosion resistance by developing new alloy compositions and manufacturing processes that tailor the metal’s internal microstructure—creating ultrafine grains with weak texture. If successful, the work could accelerate lightweighting across the automotive, aerospace, public transport, and medical sectors. The manufacturing processes themselves are exportable technologies that could generate new intellectual property for UK industry. The fellowship also aims to build a UK research team that turns magnesium from a vulnerable metal into a reliable structural and medical material.
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Light weighting is one of the biggest challenges facing manufacturers today and urgently required for next generation cars to increase fuel efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. Reducing a car's weight by 50 kg decreases emissions by up to 5g CO2/km and increases fuel economy by up to 2%. Being 75% and 33% lighter than steel and aluminium (Al), Mg is becoming more popular with automotive engineers. In theory, Mg alloys offer a promising solution for lightweighting in several industrial sectors. However, Mg components currently only constitute ~1% of a typical car’s weight. This is attributed to long-standing issues with Mg alloys such as high production cost, low formability and high corrosion rate, compared to heavier Al and steels. Therefore, designing high performance and low cost Mg alloys is in great demand for transport industry. Producing strong, formable, stainless and low-cost Mg alloys is recognised to be extremely difficult and has not to date been achieved. Traditional alloy design routes and manufacturing processing are not only time-consuming and not cost-effective, but also cannot guarantee production Mg alloys with high performance. In addition, the highly debated recrystallisation and deformation mechanisms, critical in optimising mechanical and physical properties of Mg alloys, need to be thoroughly explored and established. The overall objective of this fellowship is to develop new routes of alloy design, simultaneously developing innovative manufacturing processes, thereby producing strong, formable, stainless and low-cost Mg alloys(e.g., yield strength >300 MPa, Index Erichsen (I.E.) value indicating stretch formability >8mm, corrosion rate <0.4mg/cm2/day). This will be achieved by understanding how the alloying elements interact with each other and how the developed processes can be used to tailor multi-scale microstructures (e.g., alloys containing ultrafine grains (~1 microns) with weak texture). This fellowship will address significant challenges in coupling high mechanical properties and corrosion resistance within a single alloy system. The fellowship aims to help industrial project partners accelerate the development of new advanced light alloys. New thermomechanical/manufacturing processes are exportable technology and will permit companies to develop new IP. My research will be further extended to develop products for aerospace, public transport and medical industries and ensure a low carbon economy in the UK. Most importantly, this fellowship will assemble a new UK team of engineering and microscopists with the aim of turning vulnerable Mg into reliable structural/medical materials, thereby accelerating the pace of light weighting in several industrial sectors.
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