Innovative Nanomaterials for Enhanced Steel and Alloy Performance
A special issue of Nanomaterials (ISSN 2079-4991). This special issue belongs to the section "Nanofabrication and Nanomanufacturing".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 25 February 2026 | Viewed by 37
Special Issue Editor
Interests: ultrahigh strength steel; HEA; superalloy; nanostructure; phase transformation; twinning; strengthening; strength; ductility; deformation mechanism
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Higher strength and good ductility are desirable qualities for structural materials. However, ultra-strong alloys inevitably show strength–ductility trade-off, thereby limiting their potential applications. Over the past few years, extensive novel approaches have been applied to enhance the mechanical properties of metallic materials via the creation of nanoscale substructures, such as chemical short-range order (CSRO), chemical short-range disorder (CSRO), nanoscale co-precipitation, nanotwins, nanoscale stacking faults, a nano-metal-stable phase, and heterostructure engineering-induced nanostructures. Such innovative alloy design concepts have opened up new avenues for material exploration and property optimization. For example, in lightweight compositionally complex steel undergoing cryogenic tensile loading, the dislocation cutting of B2 nanoprecipitates enhances the steel with up to two gigapascals of ultra-high cryogenic tensile strength at a tensile elongation of 34%. Meanwhile, by successively designing a supranano (<10 nm) and short-range ordering design in fine-grained alloys, the grain boundary–related strengthening and ductilization mechanism is effectively realized through a supranano-ordering-enhanced pinning effect for dislocations and stacking faults, leading to an ultra-high tensile stress of 2600 MPa at 10% strain.
This Special Issue focuses on new findings in the field of metallic materials, which are closely related to improved performance when nanostructures are used.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to the following:
- Metallic materials with heterogeneous structures, including nanostructures;
- Metallic materials with gradient structures, including nanostructures;
- Metallic materials with nanoscale dual/multiple-phase structures;
- Bi-modal structures including nanostructures;
- Metal matrix composites with nanostructures;
- Any metallic materials strengthened via nanostructures, etc.
Prof. Dr. Yongfeng Shen
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- nanoscale precipitation
- nanotwin
- high-entropy alloy
- titanium alloy
- high-strength steel
- strength
- ductility
- strain hardening
- atomic-scale characterization
- molecular dynamics simulation
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