Counteracting hydrogen embrittlement with boron
Xizhen Dong Wins Best Presentation Award
Dr. Xizhen Dong, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials (MPI-SusMat), has been recognized with one of two Best Presentation Awards out of 90 presentations held at the 6th International Conference on Medium and High Manganese Steels (HMnS 2024) in Hong Kong. Her award-winning presentation focused on using boron doping to mitigate hydrogen embrittlement in advanced materials.

“It’s an incredible honour to receive this award,” says Dong. “It reflects the scientific community’s recognition of the importance of hydrogen embrittlement research.” The growing demand for fuel-efficient vehicles calls for materials that are both lightweight and highly crash-resistant, driving the need for innovative alloys. Advanced high-strength steels with high manganese and high aluminum contents show great promise in weight reduction but suffer from a critical drawback: they are prone to hydrogen embrittlement, which causes premature failure.
Dong’s research delves into the mechanisms and mitigation strategies of hydrogen embrittlement. She has identified intergranular cracking along austenite-ferrite phase boundaries and transgranular cracking within the ferrite phase as key failure modes in two-phase lightweight steels. To counteract hydrogen-induced intergranular failure, Dong incorporates boron into the material, leveraging its known role in interface strengthening, to inhibit intergranular fracture. While boron segregation improves resistance to intergranular cracking, it concurrently exacerbates cleavage fracture within the ferrite phase. Through post-mortem fractographic analyses and hydrogen-induced crack examination, coupled with atom probe tomography and ab initio calculations, Dong finds that the boron segregation strategy is not always effective in improving hydrogen embrittlement resistance of the two-phase steel, particularly in the presence of complicated hydrogen-induced damage behavior.
Dong earned her master’s degree in metallurgical engineering at RWTH Aachen University and joined MPI-SusMat in 2020. She completed her PhD in 2024 and now works as a postdoctoral researcher on hydrogen embrittlement in high-performance alloys and sustainable alloy design.
The HMnS conference unites international scientists and engineers to discuss challenges and advancements in medium and high manganese steels. Topics include advanced characterization, alloy design, phase transformation, deformation, hydrogen embrittlement and damage fostering collaboration and scientific exchange.