MSE Affiliates Win TMS Award

Schoenung (left) and Kiani will be presented with their award later this month at the TMS Annual Meeting in San Diego.

Feb. 5, 2020 - A Samueli School professor and her Ph.D. student have won an award of excellence from The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) Light Metals Division and its Recycling & Environmental Technologies Committee.

Julie Schoenung, professor and chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Ph.D. candidate Parnian Kiani, along with collaborators from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and Colorado State University, received the TMS Light Metals/Extraction and Processing Subject Award (Recycling) for a paper they wrote about how to recycle machining waste into powders that can be used in metal additive manufacturing.

Stainless steel machine chips have long been considered waste in machine shops, but the paper showed that if they are processed properly, they can be used as a starting material for metal additive manufacturing.

“There is a growing demand for more sustainable metal powder as feedstock for additive manufacturing,” Kiani said. “Our work employed theoretical and experimental analysis to introduce a novel ball-milling strategy to address this demand.” The research demonstrated that the powder made from recycled chips performed comparably to the non-recycled powders more commonly used in additive manufacturing.

The award recognized the individual excellence of the paper, which the researchers presented last year at the TMS Annual Meeting. Schoenung and Kiani will accept their award later this month at this year’s TMS Annual Meeting in San Diego.

“I am very honored to be selected to receive this award,” said Schoenung, who is an expert in novel materials processing, testing and characterization, as well as sustainable development of materials. “The paper highlights an important new direction of research focused on addressing alternative feedstock materials for the rapidly growing field of metal additive manufacturing. I am proud of our team of researchers for being among the first to develop these ideas and for our ability to advance this important field of study.”

Kiani, whose doctoral work explores the relationships between powder properties and resulting materials with an emphasis on sustainability, expressed gratitude to the TMS award committee and to her colleagues and supervisors. “This award means a lot to me, both personally and professionally, and has made me very excited to pursue my work on environmental issues of additive manufacturing,” she said.

TMS is a professional society that connects minerals, metals and materials scientists and engineers around the world who work in industry, academia and government positions, and nurtures the next generation of science and engineering professionals. 

-Anna Lynn Spitzer