Yifan Wang
Bio: Yifan Wang earned a PhD and a master's degree, '22, in mechanical engineering, and a master's degree, '16, in petroleum engineering from Stanford. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Tsinghua University. During doctoral research in computational mechanics with Prof. Wei Cai at Stanford, Yifan developed a stress-driven kinetics model of defect processes that governs the plastic deformation in metals and alloys. Yifan’s teaching and research was recognized as the Rising Star in Mechanical Engineering (2020, Berkeley University), and his doctoral dissertation won the Juan C. Simo Thesis Award from the Mechanics & Computation Group in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford. Yifan’s research interests lie in bridging the length- and time-scales for sustainable materials production and manufacturing, including developing new characterization tools and multiscale modeling and simulations.
Postdoctoral research project: Scale-bridging in sustainable steelmaking. Yifan will address the challenges in the carbon-intensive steel-making industry, which contributes to approximately 10 percent of global CO2 emissions. The need to decarbonize the steel industry has become pressing due to the increasing demand for steel in renewable energy production. Supported by Prof. Leora Dresselhaus-Marais (MatSci) and Prof. Xiaolin Zheng (ME), Yifan will investigate hydrogen-based direct iron reduction (HyDIR), a promising solution for decarbonizing the iron-making process. This technology replaces currently widely used carbon-heavy reduction agents (cokes/coal) with green hydrogen to cut the majority (more than 75 percent) of the carbon footprint of steel-making. The main challenge of HyDIR is the scaling issue, where different physical and chemical processes at different length scales make models at each scale not transferable. This research aims to tackle this challenge by combining advanced characterization tools, data-driven statistical learning, kinetics modeling, and atomistic simulation. Specifically, Yifan's research will focus on bridging the gap in understanding how the microstructure evolution influences the mass transport and overall kinetics of the iron-reduction. The success of this research will establish a reliable workflow for testing the HyDIR reactions, and provide a unique opportunity to reveal the fundamental connections between different length scales and the intrinsic dimensionality of the HyDIR system to guide efficient design of the iron-production process.
Research focus: Sustainable Manufacturing - Steel
Advisors: Leora Dresselhaus-Marias - Materials Science & Engineering | Xiaolin Zheng - Mechanical Engineering