Green steel from red mud through climate-neutral hydrogen plasma reduction.

Red mud is the waste of bauxite refinement into alumina, the feedstock for aluminium production. With about 180 million tonnes produced per year, red mud has amassed to one of the largest environmentally hazardous waste products, with the staggering amount of 4 billion tonnes accumulated on a global scale. Here we present how this red mud can be turned into valuable and sustainable feedstock for ironmaking using fossil-free hydrogen-plasma-based reduction, thus mitigating a part of the steel-related carbon dioxide emissions by making it available for the production of several hundred million tonnes of green steel.

Opportunities of combinatorial thin film materials design for the sustainable development of magnesium-based alloys.

Magnesium-based lightweight structural materials exhibit potential for energy savings. However, the state-of-the-art quest for novel compositions with improved properties through conventional bulk metallurgy is time, energy, and material intensive. Here, the opportunities provided by combinatorial thin film materials design for the sustainable development of magnesium alloys are evaluated.

Interstitial atoms enable joint twinning and transformation induced plasticity in strong and ductile high-entropy alloys.

High-entropy alloys (HEAs) consisting of multiple principle elements provide an avenue for realizing exceptional mechanical, physical and chemical properties. We report a novel strategy for designing a new class of HEAs incorporating the additional interstitial element carbon. This results in joint activation of twinning- and transformation-induced plasticity (TWIP and TRIP) by tuning the matrix phase's instability in a metastable TRIP-assisted dual-phase HEA.