Acta Materialia, Acta Biomaterialia, Scripta Materialia, Materialia Journals

Günter Gottstein

The recipient of the 2021 Acta Materialia Gold Medal is Prof. emeritus Dr. Dr. h. c. Günter Gottstein, Distinguished Senior Professor of RWTH Aachen University. Prior to his retirement, he was Professor and Director of the Institute of Physical Metallurgy and Metal Physics (IMM) at RWTH Aachen University.

Prof. Gottstein studied physics at RWTH Aachen University and obtained his diploma in 1969. In 1973 he was promoted in metal physics to Dr. rer. nat., and became Dr. habil. of Physical Metallurgy and Metal Physics of the Faculty of Mining and Metallurgy of RWTH in 1979. In the same year he moved to the USA to work as a visiting scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, then as a visiting associate professor at MIT and, in 1983, became an associate professor in the Department of Metallurgy, Mechanics and Materials Science of Michigan State University where he was promoted to full professor in 1985. In 1989 he returned to RWTH Aachen University to succeed Kurt Lücke as director of IMM. From 1993 through 1999 he was also appointed head of the Central Electron Facility of RWTH and served as Dean of the Faculty of Mining Metallurgy and Geosciences from 1996 through 1998. He became Professor Emeritus in 2013 and was appointed as the first Distinguished Senior Professor of RWTH Aachen University in 2014.

Prof. Gottstein dedicated his scientific activities to the fields of materials modeling and simulation, interface science, particularly grain boundary migration and the properties of grain boundary junctions, crystallographic texture, high temperature plasticity with focus on dynamic recrystallization, intermetallic matrix composites, and properties of magnesium alloys.

In 1994 he established the collaborative research center on ‘Integral Materials Modeling’ (now known as Integrated Computational Materials Engineering ‘ICME’), where computational tools were developed for through process modeling to predict the final material properties from the knowledge of a given process scheme on the basis of microstructural development. The research center was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for 12 years and was succeeded by a transfer center to make the results available to industry. In fact, many of the tools and models are currently used in practice, particularly in the aluminum industry. In the field of crystallographic texture, he devoted his research to the measurement of microtexture, utilizing synchrotron radiation for crystallographic orientation measurements in microscopic volumes and applying advanced informatic tools, such as the Hough transformation, for an automated evaluation of diffraction patterns. With the advent of Electron Back Scatter Diffraction in Scanning Electron Microscopes he contributed to the early development of the semi-automated evaluation of Kikuchi-patterns, critically evaluated the statistical relevance of microtexture measurements and developed devices for macro-and microtexture measurements at very high temperatures, especially for in-situ measurements of transformation textures in steels. With his colleague, Lasar Shvindlerman of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he established a laboratory at IMM for the measurement of grain boundary properties. Important results include the migration of grain boundaries under a magnetic driving force, high angle grain boundary motion enforced by an applied shear force and, jointly with Dr. Shvindlerman, the measurement of energy and mobility of grain boundary junctions. The measurements and theoretical analysis of junction properties and their relevance for grain growth, especially in nanocrystalline solids, constitute pioneering work in this field and are considered as seminal contributions to our current understanding of microstructural evolution during grain growth. Further fundamental contributions pertain to the role of annealing twinning for the occurrence of dynamic recrystallization and the fabrication of fiber reinforced NiAl composites for very high temperature applications beyond superalloys, or specific microstructural models tailored for modern computer architectures with very high computational speed to allow physical models to be utilized for process control.

Prof. Gottstein’s scientific accomplishments have been recognized with many awards and honors, including the Masing Award of German Metallurgical Society, 1982, the Heisenberg Research Fellowship, German Science Foundation, 1981-1983, the Max-Planck-Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation and the Max-Planck-Society, 1998, the Sawamura Award of the Iron and Steel Institute of Japan, 2002, the Heyn Medal, German Materials Society, 2003, the Werner Köster Award, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Materialkunde, 2005, the Gold Medal Award, Federation of European Materials Societies, 2011, the Best Publication Award, Faculty of Georessources and Materials Engineering, RWTH Aachen University (2013), the C.S. Smith Award of the ReX&GG Conference Series, 2013, the Kurdjumov Medal, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2014, the TMS Distinguished Educator Award (2015), the AMAP Research Award (2015), and the Hans Bunge Award of the ICOTOM Conference Series, 2020. He was honored as Honorary Professor, Moscow Institute for Steel and Alloys, Russia, (2006), Honorary Professor, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China (2007), Honorary Doctorate, Technical University, BA Freiberg, Faculty of Materials Science and Materials Technology (2009), Honorary member, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Materialkunde (2010), RWTH Distinguished Senior Professor (2014). He served as editor of Acta Materialia (2004-2019) and was a member of the editorial boards of several journals.

Prof. Gottstein will receive the Acta Materialia Gold Medal at the 150^th Anniversary TMS meeting to be held in Orlando, Florida in March 2021.

John Jonas

The recipient of the 2017 Acta Materialia Gold Medal is Dr. John J. Jonas, Henry Birks Professor Emeritus, Department of Mining and Materials Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Dr. Jonas was born in Montreal and graduated from McGill University with a bachelor’s degree in Metallurgical Engineering in 1954. After working for one year at the Steel Company of Wales in Port Talbot, he attended Cambridge University on an Athlone Fellowship and received a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Sciences in 1960. On returning to Montreal, he began teaching “mechanical metallurgy” at McGill and built up a research laboratory that includes a number of specialized testing machines and is particularly well equipped for experimental investigations in the field of high temperature deformation.

Professor Jonas’ most important scientific contributions are related to determining what happens to sheet steel when it is red hot and flying through a rolling mill at 100 km/hr. The basic phenomena involved include dynamic and post-dynamic recrystallization, dynamic transformation and retransformation, and the dynamic and strain-induced precipitation of carbonitrides. He and his co-workers have made seminal contributions to all three of these areas of research. An important related innovation was establishment of the laboratory method of determining the Tnr (temperature of no-recrystallization) during rolling, a procedure that is now employed in rolling mills worldwide. This work has resulted in major improvements in the understanding and control of the microstructural changes taking place during steel processing and has led to more accurate computer models for the control of industrial rolling mills.

In addition to his research in ferrous metallurgy, Professor Jonas has made numerous contributions to the understanding of the deformation behavior of non-ferrous metals. These have included explanations of variant selection of twins in Mg and Ti, of the causes of plastic instability and flow localization during metal forming, and of texture development during deformation, annealing and phase transformation.

He has received numerous awards for this work, including the Réaumur and Gold Medals of the French Metallurgical Society, the Hatchett Medal of the Metals Society (U.K.), the Airey, Dofasco and Alcan Awards of the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, the Gold Medal of the Canadian Metal Physics Association, the NSERC Award of Excellence, the Killam Prize for Engineering, the Michael Tenenbaum Award of the American Institute of Metallurgical Engineers, the Hunt Silver Medal of the US Iron and Steel Society, the Barrett Silver Medal and G. Macdonald Young Award of the American Society for Metals, the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (Germany), and the Yukawa Silver Medal and two Sawamura Bronze Medals of the Iron and Steel Institute of Japan. Professor Jonas has been elected a Fellow of the American Society for Metals, Royal Society of Canada, Canadian Academy of Engineering, Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, and Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is an Honorary Member of the Iron and Steel Institute of Japan and of the Indian Institute of Metals. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1993, a Chevalier of the Order of Quebec in 2000, and received the Quebec prize for science (Prix du Québec - Marie Victorin) in 1995. He has served as a visiting professor in numerous countries, including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, China, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, the USA and the USSR.

In 1985, Dr. Jonas was appointed to the CSIRA/NSERC Chair of Steel Processing at McGill, a position which was funded jointly by the Canadian Steel Industry Research Association and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. In this capacity, he worked closely with the Canadian steel industry, and collaborated in the solution of a number of important processing problems. He and his colleagues have been granted five sets of international patents associated with steel rolling, three of which have been assigned to the sponsoring companies.

He has trained over 200 students and research fellows in the specializations outlined above and he and his students have published more than 800 papers, 100 of them in Acta and Scripta Materialia. His current h-index (Hirsch number) is 83 and he has more than 25,000 citations to his credit.

Dr. Jonas will receive the Gold Medal at the TMS Annual Meeting in San Diego in March 2017.

Andre Pineau

The winner of the 2013 Acta Materialia Gold Medal is André Pineau, currently Emeritus Professor at the Ecole des Mines de Paris’s Centre des Matériaux. André Pineau received an Engineering/Metallurgy degree from the Ecole des Mines de Nancy in 1965, and a PhD degree in Physical Sciences from the University of Nancy in 1969. He joined the Ecole des Mines de Paris in 1965, where he largely contributed to the creation of the Ecole des Mines’s Centre des Matériaux. This Centre has become one of the largest of its kind in Europe specialized in the field of physics and mechanics of materials with about 200 people, including 90 PhD students. He was promoted to Professor in 1978 and was Head of the Ecole des Mines’s Materials Science and Engineering Undergraduate Department from 1979 to 2006. He was responsible for the Centre des Matériaux’s Mechanical Metallurgy Research Unit, associated with the National Scientific Research Centre of France (CNRS), from 1978 to 1994. From very early on in his career, he developed strong links internationally, e.g. with MIT, where he was twice a Visiting Professor at the Materials Science and Engineering Department (for a year in 72/73 and again for 6 months in 1983) working with Professors R. Pelloux, A. Argon and F. McClintock; with Kyoto University in 1977 where he collaborated with Professor I. Tamura on phase transformations in steels.

Professor Pineau’s scientific career has been repeatedly recognized with prestigious awards and honors, including the Rist Price from the Société Française de Métallurgie (SFM) in 1974, the Osmond Price from the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale (SEIN) in 1983, the H. Becquerel Price from the French Academy of Sciences in 1987, the CNRS Silver Medal in 1989, the Portevin Medal from the Société Française de Métallurgie et Matériaux (SF2M) in 1991, the Gaz de France Price from the French Academy of Sciences in 1992, the Great Medal from SEIN in 1994, the Griffith Medal from European Structural Integrity Society (ESIS) in 1996, the Gold Medal from the Federation of European Materials Societies (FEMS) in 1997, the Honorary Medal from the SF2M in 1999, and the ASTM George R. Irwin Medal in 2011. His contributions have also been recognized with memberships of many scientific advisory boards and committees. Professor A. Pineau was elected as a member of the Comité des Applications of the French Academy of Sciences (CADAS) in 1994, of the French Academy of Engineering in 2000, and as a fellow of the Société Française de Métallurgie et Matériaux (SF2M). He has also been a member of the Editorial Board of the journal on Fatigue and Fracture of Engineering Materials and Structures, and the editor of the Journal of Nuclear Engineering and Design. He was elected as Vice President of the European Structural Integrity Society (ESIS) in 2002, and as an Honorary Member of the Deutscher Verband für Materialforschung und –Prüfung (DVM) Society in Germany. He was a scientific advisor for Electricité de France (EDF) in 1994, for Usinor from 1998 to 2006, and has been for the French Atomic Energy Authority (CEA) since 1980. He has also served as an expert in numerous material and structural failure cases for the nuclear, transportation, pipeline, aeronautical and aerospace industries.

Professor André Pineau has published more than 300 journal articles, including 20 in Acta Materialia and Scripta Materialia, five textbooks, co-authored with D. François and A. Zaoui, and co-edited and co-authored 20 others dealing with the mechanical behavior of metallic materials. He is a passionate educator and has been an inspirational force to many undergraduate students, to the 85 PhD students who studied under his supervision and to his colleagues at the Ecole des Mines and at international institutions. As André Pineau has always been concerned with the education of school children, he is also currently strongly engaged in the development of practical scientific activities in elementary schools.

His early research was devoted to the study of the precipitation strengthening in nickel and iron base alloys. His main contributions in this field, with R. Cozar, were the discovery of the co-precipitation of γ’ and γ” phases leading to the “compact morphology” and to the development of a theory on the raftening of γ’ precipitates in nickel base single crystals, work published in Acta Metallurgica in 1976. He was also involved (with B. Thomas, F. Lecroisey and L. Remy) in a pioneering study which identified the effects of temperature on the stacking fault energy of FCC metals and alloys. His research group also largely contributed to the understanding of the strengthening effect associated with mechanical twinning in low stacking fault energy alloys, such as Fe-Ni-Cr and also Fe-Mn alloys which form now the bases of TWIP steels used in the automotive industry. With R. Pelloux from M.I.T., he also investigated the effect of strain-induced martensitic transformation on the fatigue behavior of unstable stainless steels. In the early 70s, he focused his research activities on high temperature fatigue and creep-fatigue oxidation interactions in nickel base alloys and austenitic stainless steels. His work (with E. Andrieu and R. Molins) showed in particular the existence of a critical oxygen partial pressure below which the fracture mode remains transgranular in Ni base alloys. He identified the mechanisms of oxygen penetration along grain boundaries which are responsible for intergranular fracture of these materials, and the interactions between transgranular fatigue cracks and intergranular creep damage in stainless steels (with C. Levaillant). The resulting understanding and approach has inspired to some extent the R5 assessment procedure for the high temperature response of metallic structures developed in the United Kingdom, in particular those used for the initiation of cracks by creep and fatigue damage. He also conducted a number of studies devoted to multiaxial fatigue, such as the effects of the environment and loading paths on the directional aspect of crack initiation.

In the 80s, André Pineau concentrated his research efforts on the study of fracture (ductile, brittle, ductile-to-brittle transition) in ferritic steels used for the fabrication of nuclear pressurized water reactors (PWR) and in duplex stainless steels. He developed the so-called “local approach to fracture” which is now widely used by engineers and scientists worldwide. This approach, which is mainly based on the micromechanisms of failure ahead of a crack tip, has largely contributed to the improvement of the transferability of laboratory test results to components. His work in this area over the past thirty years has greatly influenced the development of fracture mechanics standards (i.e. fracture toughness characterization and structural integrity assessments), and has thus had a profound impact in failure analysis, structural integrity code and material development in a broad range of industries, such as the automotive, aerospace, nuclear, pressure vessel and piping industries. In 1981, work by one part of his research group (also known as “Beremin”) on cleavage fracture revealed for the first time that the fracture toughness of ferritic steels in the lower shelf regime is not an intrinsic property but depends on specimen size. Since then, the local approach to fracture methodology has become an established discipline in its own right, being largely used to explain a number of results which cannot be easily rationalized using a global fracture mechanics approach. André Pineau is continuing his work on the micro-mechanisms of fracture, in particular the effect of the bimodality of failure modes (cleavage and Intergranular damage) which can be found in thick components containing segregated zones, and the crossing of a grain boundary with a large twist component by a cleavage crack.

Professor Pineau will receive his Gold Medal during the December 2013 MRS Fall meeting in Boston, MA. A symposium, entitled “Materials: Fundamentals of Fatigue and Fracture”, will be held in connection with this award.