HOWE MEMORIAL LECTURE

MONDAY, 5 MAY 2025 • 8 A.M. 

The AIST Howe Memorial Lecture Award was established in 1923 to honor the late professor Henry Marion Howe, who helped turn steelmaking from an art into a science. This award shall be selected every other year on the odd year. The honorary lecturer shall present a lecture on a technical subject of particular interest to the association.

2025 HOWE MEMORIAL LECTURER

Tadashi Furuhara

Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

"Roles of Thermomechanical Processing on Microstructure Control of High-Strength Steels"

Since the early 1960s, various kinds of thermomechanical processing have been developed for improving strength and ductility/toughness balances of high-strength steels. Major interests were in grain size controls, and hot deformation of austenite matrix was useful to refine final microstructure after phase transformations to ferrite, bainite and martensite structure during cooling. In the 1990s and 2000s, severe plastic deformation attracted strong interest in achieving ultrafine-grained structure, and the essences of such metallurgical concepts were also explored for possible applications in production. It should be mentioned that new dynamic phenomena were recognized in phase transformation and recrystallization during those investigations. Recently, the importance of reheating processes has been emphasized to positively utilize microstructure inhomogeneities in research of advanced high-strength steel. In this lecture, importance of such technology, as well as its future perspectives, will be discussed from fundamental viewpoints of physical metallurgy.