Langdon and graduate student Cheng Xu, a Ph.D. candidate, use a 150-ton press to transform a cylinder of aluminum alloy into an ultra-fine grain metal.

Photo/Bob Calverely

Langdon, a British citizen who is not eligible for regular NAE membership, was one of 49 fellows elected this year and one of only three who does not reside in the United Kingdom.

"I am humbled by this recognition from my colleagues in Britain," said Langdon, who is also a professor of earth sciences in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. "It’s all the more remarkable because I have not published a scientific paper with anyone in the U.K. for about 30 years."

Langdon joined the USC faculty in 1971.

The academy announcement cites Langdon as "outstanding for his extensive research on high-temperature creep, superplasticity and fracture of metals, ceramics and composite materials" and "distinguished for elegant scientific work applied to the behavior of materials at high temperature and the engineering problems of shaping components."

The behavior of metal at high temperatures became a critical issue in the 1950s when the first nuclear reactors were built. Engineers strove to control metals to prevent premature failure. Some metals, they discovered, may reach a state of "superplasticity," a state similar to how toffee or glass softens under heat.

"If you understand how materials flow at high temperatures, then you can design ways of making parts," said Langdon. "You can take a sheet of metal and use superplasticity to form it into a complicated shape."

Superplasticity is currently used to make curved wings and other specially shaped aerospace parts, exotic bodies for low-production sports cars and the sleekly aerodynamic noses of subway cars.

Langdon said the technology’s drawback has been that it takes up to 30 minutes to shape a single part using superplasticity. However, his most recent research has found a solution: Working with his students at USC, he has been fabricating ultra-fine grained metals with grain sizes down to the nanometer range.

"Metal is granular, but as the grain size in a metal gets smaller, we have been able to demonstrate, both theoretically and experimentally, that superplasticity can be done at a much faster rate," he said. "A part that took 20 minutes can now be made in about 10 seconds."

When the latest superplasticity technology utilizing ultra-fine grain metals moves from the laboratory to industry, it will be possible to use superplasticity to mass-produce items in the millions instead of in the hundreds, Langdon said.

For several years, in the 1980s, Langdon’s USC lab was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records when he elongated a piece of metal by roughly 5,000 percent.

"That was back when the book contained many scientific feats," he said, laughing. "When the book changed, we were dropped."

Langdon has published more than 500 scientific articles on the high-temperature properties of metals and ceramics, including well over 100 since 1997.

"I have a lot of collaborators," he said modestly.

Langdon is currently a visiting senior fellow at the International Center for Advanced Studies in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia; a visiting professor at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Kyushu University, Japan and a visiting professor at the School of Engineering Sciences, University of Southampton, England.

He earned a B.Sc. in physics with pure and applied mathematics in 1961 from the University of Bristol and a Ph.D. in physical metallurgy in 1965 from Imperial College at the University of London. In 1980, he was awarded a D.Sc. in physics from the University of Bristol for his published research on the physics of metals.

"My family comes from the Bristol area in Southwest England and has been there forever," Langdon said. "Perhaps they helped build Stonehenge over 4000 years ago. Now that would have been an interesting engineering problem."

Contact Bob Calverley at (213) 740-4750.