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Sebastian Kube

Sebastian Kube

Assistant Professor

With over 25 metallic elements, numerous synthesis methods and processing conditions to choose from, how will we design the next generation of high-temperature alloys for turbines, jet engines and reactors? How will we find those metallic glasses with the optimal combination of glass forming ability, plasticity, and thermoplastic formability? How will we reduce the cost and environmental impact of materials used across consumer goods, energy, aerospace, and defense?

With the traditional metallurgical approach, developing new alloys and understanding their complex behavior is excruciatingly slow.

In the Autonomous Alloy Discovery Lab, we work to accelerate this process by orders of magnitude through autonomous materials discovery: We use robotics, develop new characterization methods, and harness modeling and data science tools to rapidly study complex behavior across vast, multidimensional parameter spaces.

Areas of particular interest include:

Refractory Multi Principal Element Alloys promise to reach operating temperatures beyond 1300°C, but achieving a competitive balance of properties remains a challenge. We pursue a variety of strategies, from B2 precipitation for ductility and strength, to rapid solidification processing and beyond, to efficiently navigate the vast design space towards optimal performance in extreme environments.

The composition-structure-property relationships of metallic liquids are complex, difficult to characterize, and remain largely unexplored. Yet, they fundamentally govern the solidification behavior and glass forming ability of all alloys. To fill this knowledge gap, we develop new methods to measure and model the relaxation kinetics, thermodynamics, and atomic structure of metallic liquids.

From high entropy alloys, to nanocrystalline alloys, to quasicrystals and beyond, we streamline and accelerate the alloy discovery process to find better alloys faster.

Department

Materials Science & Engineering

Contact

1117, Engineering Research Building
1500 Engineering Dr
Madison, WI

  • PhD 2021, Yale University
  • BS 2016, Giessen University

  • Autonomous materials discovery
  • Refractory alloys for extreme environments
  • Glass forming ability and structure of metallic liquids
  • Rapid solidification processing
  • Lab automation for high-throughput experiments

  • 2024 Department of Energy, Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy, ARPA-E IGNIITE Early Career Award
  • 2024 Research Corporation for Science Advancement, RCSA Scialog Fellow for Automating Chemical Laboratories
  • 2021 Acta, Acta Student Award 2020
  • 2021 Acta and Scripta Materialia, Excellence in Reviewing Award 2020
  • 2020 Materials Research Society, Gold Award-MRS Graduate Student Awards 2020

  • Lund, E. T., Huang, S., Kube, S., Liu, G., Johnson, N., Colley, W., Mehta, A., Reck, B. K., Sohn, S., & Schroers, J. (2024). A general indicator for the tolerance to impurities of metals and alloys. Materialia, 33, 102037.
  • Mullin, K. M., Kube, S., Wu, S. K., & Pollock, T. M. (2024). Cracking and Precipitation Behavior of Refractory BCC--B2 Alloys Under Laser Melting Conditions. Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A, 1--15.
  • Frey, C., You, H., Kube, S., Balbus, G. H., Mullin, K., Oppenheimer, S., Holgate, C. S., & Pollock, T. M. (2024). High Temperature B2 Precipitation in Ru-Containing Refractory Multi-principal Element Alloys. Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A, 55(6), 1739--1764.
  • Kube, S., Frey, C., McMullin, C., Neuman, B., Mullin, K. M., & Pollock, T. M. (2024). Navigating the BCC-B2 refractory alloy space: Stability and thermal processing with Ru-B2 precipitates. Acta Materialia, 265, 119628.
  • Senkov, O. N., Kube, S., Drazin, J. W., Soni, V., Miracle, D. B., Butler, T. M., Pollock, T. M., & Banerjee, R. (2024). Thermal and Elastic Properties of an A2/B2 Refractory High Entropy Superalloy and Its Constituent Phases. Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A, 1--14.
  • Liu, G., Sohn, S., Kube, S., Raj, A., Mertz, A., Nawano, A., Gilbert, A., Shattuck, M. D., O'Hern, C. S., & Schroers, J. (2023). Machine learning versus human learning in predicting glass-forming ability of metallic glasses. Acta Materialia, 243, 118497.
  • Liu, N., Sohn, S., Na, M. Y., Park, G. H., Raj, A., Liu, G., Kube, S., Yuan, F., Liu, Y., Chang, H. J., & others, (2023). Size-dependent deformation behavior in nanosized amorphous metals suggesting transition from collective to individual atomic transport. Nature Communications, 14(1), 5987.
  • Kube, S., Sohn, S., Ojeda-Mota, R., Evers, T., Polsky, W., Liu, N., Ryan, K., Rinehart, S., Sun, Y., & Schroers, J. (2022). Compositional dependence of the fragility in metallic glass forming liquids. Nature Communications, 13(1), 3708.
  • Liu, N., Ma, T., Liao, C., Liu, G., Mota, R. M., Liu, J., Sohn, S., Kube, S., Zhao, S., Singer, J. P., & others, (2021). Combinatorial measurement of critical cooling rates in aluminum-base metallic glass forming alloys. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 3903.
  • Chen, Z., Datye, A., Simon, G. H., Zhou, C., Kube, S., Liu, N., Liu, J., Schroers, J., & Schwarz, U. D. (2020). Atomic-Scale Imprinting by Sputter Deposition of Amorphous Metallic Films. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 12(47), 52908--52914.

  • M S & E 352 - Materials Science-Transformation of Solids (Spring 2025)
  • M S & E 790 - Master's Research or Thesis (Spring 2025)
  • M S & E 530 - Thermodynamics of Solids (Fall 2024)
  • M S & E 790 - Master's Research or Thesis (Fall 2024)