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MUL student wins Golden Medal at the ICMCTF Graduate Student Awards |
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The Golden Medal of this year’s ICMCTF Graduate Awards went to MUL student Richard Rachbauer. The doctoral candidate of assoz. Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.mont. Paul H. Mayrhofer in the Chair of Metal Sciences and Metallic Materials at the Montan University of Leoben received the award at the International Conference on Metallurgical Coatings and Thin Films (ICMCTF) held in San Diego, California last week.
Rachbauer won the Golden Medal on account of his excellent research achievements in the field of hard material layers by means of an atom probe. The Golden Medal is given to doctoral students based on the quality of their written research summary for the oral presentation, the presentation itself, their success and achievements during the thesis in addition to the selected thesis topic. Rachbauer is the third of Mayrhofer’s students in succession to receive this prize.
Thin layer systems with prominent qualities
The field of surface technology at the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Testing primarily researches and develops thin layer systems which are applied industrially onto tools, e.g. as a protection against wear and corrosion at high temperatures. These materials are only a few thousands of a millimetre thick and owe their prominent qualities for the most part to their microstructure. The microstructure can be systematically influenced by the production via plasma-supported cathode sputtering without affecting the thermo-dynamic balance.
Metal nitride bonds and their special qualities are the core interest of the working group "Nanostructured Materials" with the direction of Prof. Mayrhofer. In addition to the new combinations of materials and production procedures which are the subject of research in Leoben, the current focus is on understanding the behaviour of these high-performance materials under load at an atomic level.
Three-dimensional atom probe
In his thesis, Rachbauer works on employing the technology of the three-dimensional atom probe for the examination of wear protective coatings. The probe has been available at the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Testing at the MUL for only a few years. The first results of his research have been partially published and demonstrate the first successful use of this technology in the area of hard material layers worldwide.
"The possibility to research these materials at an atomic level in order to eventually fathom the cause for their special qualities will help promote the predictability of material behaviour when applied, and will allow an application-oriented material design", Rachbauer said. "In addition to the presentation at the CMCTF conference in San Diego, these prospects may have been the decisive factor for the committee of the Graduate student Award to give the Gold Medal to this project."
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