UQ PhD international awards in Materials Science

Supervisor – Professor Mingxing Zhang

Four PhD scholarships are available now within the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering. The successful applicants will work on two Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Discovery Projects. One is one high entropy alloys and another is on additive manufacturing of metals.

The two PhD projects on high entropy alloys aim to design and develop a new and cost-effective high entropy alloy (HEA) or compositionally complex alloy (CCA) with superior mechanical properties and therefore enable the industry applications of this type of metallic materials. Big data analytics can be used to design the composition of the new alloys and additive manufacturing approach may be used to produce the CCAs. One project focuses on grain refinement to exploit effective grain refiners for the BCC matrix of the CCAs to refine the microstructure so that ductility and formability of the CCAs are improved. This objective can be achieved through re-design of alloy compositions based on the latest principles of grain refinement for cast metals (the edge-to-edge matching model and the interdependence model). Another project is to develop proper thermomechanical processes for the FCC matrix CCAs to produce high quality wrought alloys with superior mechanical properties. This thermomechanical process includes hot forming with focus on rolling or forging to be done in a Gleeble thermomechanical simulator, and heat treatment.

The two PhD projects on additive manufacturing (AM) are to develop practical and effective technologies to improve the AM processability of engineering materials that are currently hard to or even cannot be processed/fabricated via AM. Such materials include ceramics, most superalloys and copper alloys, the majority of tool and high ultrahigh strength steels, high strength aluminium alloys, and some titanium alloys. The development is based on the current understanding of factors that govern the quality of AM components and of the causes for low AM processability of these types of alloys. The most promising approach to improve the processability is grain refinement that can be achieved during solidification of the melt pools. Thus, the research is to exploit effective grain refiners for various materials produced through AM. One project focuses on ceramics, including MAX Phase materials, and another is on engineering alloys.

Upon successful completion of the PhD project, candidates will be trained to be experts on alloy design, high entropy alloys and additive manufacturing. In addition to gaining vast knowledge of materials science, candidates will also to be trained for advanced materials characterisations using the University's state-of-art facilities. Furthermore, high skills in writing scientific papers, reports and funding applications is another benefit the candidates will obtain from the research projects.

You must meet the entry requirements for a higher degree by research.

$28,597 per annum (2021 rate), indexed annually. A top-up of $5,000 per annum for up to 3 years is also available.

To apply for admission and scholarship, follow this link. There is no separate application for scholarship because you will have the opportunity to request scholarship consideration on the application for admission.