Ivor Jenkins 2015 award winner announced
May 6, 2015
The UK’s Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3) has announced that Dr Yuyuan Zhao, Reader in Materials Engineering and Head of Centre for Materials and Structures, University of Liverpool, UK, has been awarded the 2015 Ivor Jenkins Medal. The prestigious award is presented to individuals in recognition of a significant contribution that has enhanced the scientific, industrial or technological understanding of materials processing or component production using particulate materials.
Dr Zhao is cited as having made an outstanding contribution to Powder Metallurgy in developing and commercialising innovative powder based technologies for manufacturing metal foams and metal matrix syntactic foams and in understanding centrifugal atomisation for metal powder production.
Dr Zhao invented the Lost Carbonate Sintering (LCS) process, which was the first commercialised particulate-based process for manufacturing porous metals. The technology has been licensed to C-Tech Innovations Ltd and a new start-up company, Versarien, was founded in 2010 to commercialise the process for micro-porous copper in thermal management applications. Versarien floated on the AIM submarket of the London Stock Exchange in June 2013 and subsequently acquired a volume manufacturing plant to expand its production capabilities to meet growing customer demand.
Also recognised as an internationally leading expert in metal matrix syntactic foams, Dr Zhao developed a sintering method to manufacture aluminium, steel and titanium matrix syntactic foams and observed, for the first time, the Griffith-type rupture in metal matrix syntactic foams under compression.
