Alex Meisami

The effects of accumulative roll bonding (ARB) on the microstructure and mechanical properties of an AA 1060/Y₂O₃ nanocomposite are investigated. AA 1060 alloy sheets that had been pre-rolled to a thickness of 1 mm were annealed at 430 °C, stacked with Y₂O₃ nanoparticles, and roll-bonded with a 50% thickness reduction per pass up to five passes. FESEM images, tensile testing (ASTM E8), and Vickers hardness measurements were used to characterize the material. With an increasing number of ARB passes, the dispersion of the Y₂O₃ particles within the AA 1060 sheets improved, as indicated by the increasing value of the dispersion index D (from 0.35 at pass 1 to 0.81 at pass 5); the ultimate tensile strength of the nanocomposite sheets increased from 77.5 MPa for the as-annealed sheets to 187 MPa for the sheets after five passes of roll bonding, and the hardness of the sheets reached 57.5 HV after five passes of roll bonding (≈2.4× the hardness of the annealed sheets). Furthermore, the elongation of the nanocomposite sheets decreased sharply after the first pass of roll bonding but then stabilized between 3.5 and 5%. A physics-guided saturation model is fitted to the measured UTS data, and leave-one-out cross-validation is used to assess its limited predictive capability.

This paper examines how companies that invest in digital technologies, including artificial intelligence and other regenerative technologies, contribute to environmental change. While these technologies are increasingly integrated into corporate operations, their environmental and climate impacts remain uncertain. By analyzing publicly listed companies in the US, we aim to understand how investments in these technologies influence a firm’s perspective on environmental and climate issues. We focus on a firm’s greenhouse gas emissions and reduction of natural resource consumption. Through our analysis of technology investments and textual search measures related to artificial intelligence, we find that firms investing in these technologies are more likely to limit greenhouse gas emissions and reduce natural resource consumption. The findings suggest that such technologies can be leveraged to mitigate environmental risks. We discuss the implications of these results in the paper.

The U.S. ironmaking sector plays a key role in global greenhouse gas emissions, mainly due to long-standing practices such as blast furnaces (BFs) and direct reduction (DR). In this work, we develop a new mathematical approach to estimate future CO₂ emissions from the U.S. ironmaking industry through 2050. Our approach uses historical data from 2005 to 2021 and incorporates economic and energy use indicators to explore how emissions might change over time. According to our results, unless significant technological improvements and stronger energy policies are implemented, the industry is likely to continue producing large amounts of CO₂. These findings highlight the pressing need to adopt cleaner alternatives—such as hydrogen-based direct reduction—to help meet international climate goals. Supporting the transition to low-emission technologies contributes to broader efforts in sustainable industrial development and long-term climate resilience.