High Throughput Microwave Heat-treatment and Characterization Technologies

Lei Zhao, Min Wei\ Lixia Yang, Xuejing Shen, Haizhou Wang
China Iron & Steel Research Institute, Beijing 100081, China;
University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, 100083, China

EXTENDED ABSTRACT: Heat treatment plays an important part in materials development, but traditional heat treatment methods can only develop one target temperature/cycle at a time, which impairs the experimental efficiency in the development of new materials. We have therefore introduced the use of high-throughput experiments, changed the traditional sequential iterative method to parallel processing, and developed an efficient multi-temperature-field heat-treatment method. Microwave radiation is used as the heating source, and the method takes advantage of the selective heating ability of microwaves to generate 100 temperature zones that can heat treat 100 individual sheet samples simultaneously. The method incorporates various rapid characterization techniques, which enables a large amount of characterization data to be obtained in a short time. The obtained data can be uploaded to a high-throughput materials database to provide data to support subsequent studies. In this study, high-carbon, high-chromium steel was subjected to parallel tempering heat treatment at 109-786°C. The relationship between the tempering temperature and the material microstructure and properties was derived from the changes in the microstructure and properties after parallel tempering, and used to verify the feasibility of this method.

Keywords: High-throughput microwave heating treatment; high-throughput characterization; microwave heating REFERENCES
[1] Min Wei, Lei Zhao etc., Acta Mater., 261, (2023) 119365

Brief Introduction of Speaker
Lei Zhao

Prof. Lei Zhao has completed his PhD from China Iron & Steel Research Institute. He is the Director of Materials Genome Engineering Department of NCS Testing Technology Co., Ltd. and engages in high-throughput synthesis and characterization of metal materials. He has published more than 10 papers in JMST, Engineering, Acta Materialia, Rare Metals, MMTA etc. journals and has authorized more than 15 invention patents in the United States and China.