About
Dr Dikai Guan is an Associate Professor in Lightweight Materials and leads the research areas in developing new high performance light alloys, tailoring microstructure and designing pertinent experiments for microstructure characterisation He pioneered the design of in-situ casting to produce pore-free nanostructured Mg alloys during his PhD study. His work has been published in high impact journals including Nature, Acta Mater., Scripta Mater. He is a current holder of a prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to develop new light Mg alloys for lightweight applications. After that, he was awarded two Royal Society award and grant. He organised a highly reputed national EBSD annual meeting with Royal Microscopical Society in 2021. Dikai is currently working closely with industrial partners, aiming to convert light alloy machining chips into bespoke products, and he is committed to deliver impact focusing on sustainable materials development and circular economy
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Design low-cost high performance alloys
- Develop novel manufacturing and thermomechanical processing
- 3D printing, Additive Manufacturing of light alloys
- Design simple section methods for 3D microstructure analysis
Research projects
Active projects
Completed projects
Publications
Biography
Dr Dikai Guan is an Associate Professor of Lightweight Metallic Materials and leads the research areas in developing new high performance light alloys.
Dikai graduated with BEng and MEng in Materials Science and Engineering from Central South University, China in 2008 and 2011. He obtained his Ph.D. on nanocrystalline Mg alloys at the University of Sheffield in 2015. He was a research associate in the following 5 years supported by EPSRC and Henry Royce Institute. In September 2020, he started his UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and built his independent research group. He was elected to the EPSRC Peer Review College of EPSRC in 2021, awarding CEng status and FHEA in 2021. He formally started to work at the University of Southampton in November 2022.