The Charpagne Group at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Department of Materials Science and Engineering aims to tune the small scale structure, or microstructure, of structural metallic materials for improved mechanical properties. The Charpagne group investigates the physical phenomena that operate during solid and liquid state processing of metallic materials for structural applications.

Together, they hope to understand how these phenomena affect the materials' microstructure and optimize the processing pathways to generate tuned microstructures that yield better macroscopic mechanical properties. The overall driving force in this process is the control of dislocation motion behavior. By optimizing the microstructure architecture, e.g. the phases in presence, grain structure, micro-texture and the very lattice structure, targeted deformation mechanisms can be triggered.

To achieve this goal, the group uses a variety of electron microscopy techniques to acquire large multi-modal and multi-scale datasets. Innovative tools, such as machine learning and computer vision, are used to post-process and analyze the data in a statistical and non-human-biased manner.