ARC Centre of Excellence for Design in Light Metals

Dr Philip Nakashima has been awarded the Australian National Measurement Institute’s most prestigious award for his work in solving an 82 year-old mystery about how electrons ‘glue’ aluminium atoms together.

The Barry Inglis Medal was awarded to Dr Nakashima, a Monash Engineering Research Fellow, on World Metrology Day (20 May, 2011) and will be presented at a formal ceremony later this year.

The medal is an annual award celebrating outstanding achievement in measurement research and excellence in practical measurements.

While the research that earned Dr Nakashima the medal took place over 18 months, it builds upon years of groundwork laid at the Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy (MCEM), the Department of Materials Engineering and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Design in Light Metals (ARC CoE DLM).

Having spent almost a decade developing a new set of techniques to analyse electron diffraction patterns – formed when high-energy electrons scatter from crystals – Dr Nakashima set out to probe the fundamental properties of aluminium.

“Aluminium is one of the focal light metals being studied at the ARC CoE DLM, where I was and still am a research fellow, and it is an important metal both chemically and commercially,” Dr Nakashima said.

Armed with powerful electron microscopes and his new techniques, Dr Nakashima was able to discover how electrons between the atoms in aluminium ‘glue’ the element together.

“In a practical sense it meant that for the first time we were able to measure very precisely and accurately, how, and by how much, aluminium atoms deviate from being perfect spheres,” Dr Nakashima said.

“Believe it or not, these tiny deviations in atomic shape strongly influence all properties of materials, except radioactivity. For theorists, electronic structure is the basis of theoretical and computer models that aim to predict the behaviour of materials, including man-made alloys.”

To put the work into context, more than half of an Airbus A380 is made from aluminium alloys. Dr Nakashima’s breakthrough comes as industries, such as alloy production for aviation and aerospace, are looking to refine production techniques based on knowledge obtained at the atomic level.

“Whilst a foreman at a foundry will not be able to say, ‘Ah, we must do this instead of that’, what the research may lead to is a deeper understanding of the driving forces that can be controlled in the alloy production process, not just for aviation and aerospace, but every industry that uses alloys,” Dr Nakashima said.

Dr Nakashima expressed gratitude to those whose efforts contributed to him being awarded the Barry Inglis Medal, especially Dr. Andrew Smith (School of Physics), Associate Professor Joanne Etheridge (Director of MCEM) and Emeritus Professor Barry Muddle (retired Director of the ARC CoE DLM) who co-authored the key paper published earlier this year in Science (see P.N.H. Nakashima, A.E. Smith, J. Etheridge, B.C. Muddle, Science 331 (2011), 1583).

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