low carbon steel samples were both shot into and inoculated with titanium in order to improve mechanical properties such as strength and toughness. sem observations and x-ray analyses revealed that titanium nitride and titanium carbonitride precipitates being scattered in the ferrite substrate reduce the grain size in all as-cast, heat-treated and as-rolled cases. the growth of the grains at hi...

Refractory diboride with silicon carbide additive has a unique oxide scale microstructure with two condensed oxide phases (solid+liquid), and demonstrates oxidation resistance superior to either monolithic diboride or silicon carbide. We rationalize that this is because the silica-rich liquid phase can retreat outward to remove the high SiO gas volatility region, while still holding onto the zi...

Rhenium diboride is a recently recognized ultra-incompressible superhard material. Here we report the electronic (e), phonon (p), e-p coupling, and thermal properties of ReB2 from first-principles densityfunctional theory calculations and neutron scattering measurements. Our calculated elastic constants (c11 =641 GPa, c12=159 GPa, c13=128 GPa, c33=1037 GPa, and c44=271 GPa), bulk modulus (B≈350...

Thin films of the recently discovered magnesium diboride (MgB2) intermetallic superconducting compound have been grown using a magnetron sputtering deposition technique followed by in-situ annealing at 830°C. High quality films were obtained on both sapphire and MgO substrates. The best films showed maximum Tc = 35 K (onset), a transition width of 0.5 K, a residual resisitivity ratio up to 1.6,...

New candidate ground states at 1:4, 1:2, and 1:1 compositions are identified in the well-known Fe-B system via a combination of ab initio high-throughput and evolutionary searches. We show that the proposed oP12-FeB2 stabilizes by a break up of 2D boron layers into 1D chains while oP10-FeB4 stabilizes by a distortion of a 3D boron network. The uniqueness of these configurations gives rise to a ...