Recently, the American Ceramic Society announced the awards of 2021 in the field of ceramics. Professor Yanhui Chu from the School of Materials Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology won the 2021 American Ceramics Society Ross Coffin Purdy Award (https://ceramics.org/awards/ross-coffin-purdy- award).
Ultra-high temperature ceramic materials are strategic high-tech materials, which are urgently needed in major strategies of countries all over the world. They are widely used in the engines of space rockets, space shuttle vehicles, hypersonic vehicles, heat protection systems and propulsion systems of hypersonic vehicles, etc. However, with the rapid development of aerospace, national defense and military industries around the world, traditional ultra-high temperature ceramic materials can no longer meet the needs in the extreme environment. In order to develop new ultra-high temperature ceramic materials that can be applied in extreme conditions for the future, inspired by the concept of high-entropy alloys, Professor Yanhui Chu from SCUT was the first man in the world who uses first-principles calculations to predict the formation possibility of high-entropy carbide ceramics and successfully fabricated the material by solid solution method. Compared with traditional carbide ceramics, the fabricated material shows excellent thermophysical and mechanical properties with potential application prospects in extreme conditions. The result was published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society in 2019 entitled "First-principles study, fabrication and characterization of (Hf0.2Zr0.2Ta0.2Nb0.2Ti0.2)C high-entropy ceramic", which attracted extensive attention from peers across the world and became one of the five most cited JACS papers of the past five years.
The Ross Coffin Purdy Award of the American Ceramic Society was founded in 1949 to reward the author or authors who made the most valuable contribution to ceramic technical literature published two years prior to the selection year. Each year, only one research result selected on a global scale is awarded. The research article written by Professor Chu and his group is the only one in history that listed a Chinese institution as the first author unit.
Introduction to Professor Chu:
Yanhui Chu is currently a professor in School of Materials Science and Engineering at South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China.
He received his B.S. degree in materials physics at University of Jinan in China in 2009, followed by his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in materials science at Northwestern Polytechnical University in China in 2011 and 2016, respectively. During the period of PhD study, he was as a visiting scholar in John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University from Jan, 2014 to Sep, 2015. After completion of his Ph.D, he joined the School of Materials Science and Engineering at South China University of Technology in 2016 as an associate professor and then was promoted to full professor in 2019. He holds 17 patents and has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers in high-ranking journals, including Acta Materialia, Scripta Materialia, and Journal of the American Ceramic Society, etc. which have been cited more than 1900 times with an h-index of 28. He has received some scientific awards, including the Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Chinese Materials Research Society in 2017, the Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Chinese Society for Composite Materials in 2017, IFAM Young Scientist Award in 2018 and 2020, and the Natural Science Award from Ministry of Education of China in 2020.
His current research interest mainly focuses on the design, modeling and fabrication of high-entropy non-oxide ceramics and their related nanomaterials.
