She was recognized for her research related to materials for use in extreme environments
Irene Beyerlein, the Mehrabian Interdisciplinary Endowed Chair at UC Santa Barbara, has received one of the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer by being elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). A professor of mechanical engineering and materials, she was cited by the NAE for “methodologies predicting the mechanics of complex engineering materials to improve their stability and strength.”
NAE membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to, the NAE states, "engineering research, practice, or education, including significant contributions to the engineering literature" and to " pioneering new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education."
Beyerlein’s research lies at the intersection of mechanics and materials — thus, her appointments in those two departments in the UCSB College of Engineering — bringing together multiscale modeling, experimentation, and theory to guide the design of materials by controlling microstructures through manufacturing processes. She has studied how plastic deformations propagate through materials and how strain localization can give rise to the initiation of slip bands. Her work is focused especially on materials that can withstand extreme conditions, including high stress, temperature, and strain, as well as examining how lightweight materials can improve fuel economy in aircraft.
As featured in her group’s website, “Commercially available materials typically have strength or toughness limitations and trade-offs and our overarching research goals are to understand how to make novel lightweight materials that attain strengths nearer to their theoretical limits. These materials include multi-phase microstructures or nanostructures that can be manufactured in sizes suitable for structural applications. Such advanced structural materials in bulk are critical for achieving the desired fuel economy and other critical performance metrics of a vast array of applications for our aircraft, aerospace, automotive, medical, space, energy and defense industries.”
The goal in her lab is to “uncover and understand key deformation mechanisms, to model and predict prevailing defect interactions with internal grain boundaries and interfaces, and to simulate manufacturing processes in order to design pathways for target micro- or nanostructures.
According to her website, “Recent innovative research thrusts have been initiated on (i) new lightweight Mg and Ti alloys that meet the high engineering performance metrics necessary to gain marketplace acceptance, (ii) nanolayered multi-phase materials having an unusually high density of interfaces that significantly impact structural properties; (iii) advanced 3D, full-field spatially resolved mechanical modeling techniques with experimentally informed microstructures, and (iv) the use of probability modeling and dislocation theory to help bridge from the atomic scale, span the mesoscale length and time scales, and connect to the macroscopic responses.”
After receiving her PhD in theoretical and applied mechanics at Cornell University, Beyerlein began a postdoctoral appointment as a J.R. Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she remained on the scientific staff of the Theoretical Division. She has published more than five hundred academic manuscripts and been cited more than thirty three thousand times. Other notable honors received by Beyerlein include the Brimacombe Medal and Distinguished Scientist/Engineering Award from The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society), and the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers Champion H. Mathewson Award. She is also a fellow of the The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society, and the Materials Research Society. Beyerlein was among the 114 members in the newly elected class.