Our group is engaged in demand-driven basic research activities for various engineering applications. The main objectives of our research are to design and fabricate metallic nanomaterials based on considerations of its thermodynamic and kinetic stabilities, and development of WC based hard metals, W based composites, and refractory high-entropy alloys, as well as studies on the relationship between microstructures and properties of those materials.

We have developed a series of models to understand the thermal stability of nanocrystalline materials and the phase stability of multi-component alloys in terms of their microstructural evolution and phase transformation behavior. The critical conditions for rapid discontinuous grain growth and phase transition of nanomaterials can thus be determined. Also, we discovered that the lattice site occupancy of nanocrystalline materials can be modulated by tailoring the grain size.

With the guidance of multiscale modelling and high-throughput calculations, we proposed micro-mechanisms for controlling the grain size and the phase constitution of a series of materials. Thereby, a variety of methods for controllable fabrication of metallic materials and composites with stable and high performance have been developed in our group, such as nano rare-earth metals and alloys, refractory-metal based composites, and nano-, ultrafine- and coarse-grained cemented carbides.

The novel techniques facilitated the establishment of the rare-earth database, which for the first time included the nanoscale effects on the structure and performance. The studies also promoted the industrialization and high-end applications of the new-type cemented carbide materials. The developed cemented carbide products have been applied to many important engineering fields including aerospace, coal mining, steel metallurgy, power generation and precision machining. The service performance and lifetime of the components produced by hard metals developed in our group are remarkably improved.

We currently have about 70 members including staff, postdocs and postgraduates in our group. In recent years, our group has been granted more than 50 research projects supported by domestic and international organizations.