Abstract: 
Huge engineering challenges exist today in the world’s transportation, energy, construction, and water infrastructure.  Because of its versatility and massive production scale, steel can play a major role in solutions to these challenges.  Some solutions require new and better steels whose production must be integrated into existing methods.  These existing methods must also be made cleaner and more efficient.  For example, innovations in control of steel chemistry, microstructure, and processing have led to the recent development of several generations of advanced high strength steels (AHSS).  These steels possess good combinations of strength and ductility, making them particularly suited to automotive applications.  Their properties require higher levels of reactive alloying elements such as aluminum, manganese, and silicon.  These elements substantially influence steel cleanliness and development of microstructures during processing.  If these reactions are not controlled, unacceptable steel is produced and money, effort, and energy are wasted.  In this talk, I will review three projects whose objectives are to examine how to better control reactions in steels with high alloy contents during (1) liquid steel refining in the ladle, (2) solidification and cooling after continuous casting, and (3) annealing prior to hot dip galvanizing. Each project employs lab scale experiments and models to identify the fundamental thermodynamics and kinetics of reactions and then applies these fundamentals to industrial processes.

Bio: 
Bryan Webler is currently an Assistant Professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University.  He is a faculty member in the Center for Iron and Steelmaking Research (CISR).  He received a BS in Engineering Physics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2005 and an MS (2007) and PhD (2008) in Materials Science and Engineering from Carnegie Mellon. His PhD work at CMU was with CISR, studying high temperature oxidation that leads to copper-induced hot shortness. From 2008 to 2013, he was a Senior Engineer in the Materials Technology Department of the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, studying corrosion resistance and mechanical behavior of stainless steels and nickel-base alloys. Dr. Webler joined CMU in 2013.  His research interests are in the reactions between metals and their environment, both during processing and in service.  In addition to the work above, Dr. Webler has projects studying reoxidation of liquid steels, stress corrosion cracking of stainless steels, microstructure evolution in ultrahigh carbon steels, and the high temperature oxidation of multi-phase alloys.  He also teaches classes on computational thermodynamics and corrosion/oxidation of metals.