Iron Aluminides and Petr Kratochvíl

Kratochvíl initiated a modern investigation of this class of materials in our country.He has been interested in various methods how to improve iron aluminides by alloying, precipitation and insertion of hard particles.He also restored the results obtained already in fties of the last century in the development of so called PyroFerAl that was produced in Czechoslovakia and used, for example, for heat treatment installations.Professor Petr Kratochvíl has been cooperating with leading institutions for material research, for instance, with the Institute of Physics of Materials AS CR in Brno on creep studies or with the Technical University in Ostrava on material formation processes.Since aluminium is near the nonmetals on the periodic table, it can bond with metals dierently than do other metals and hence the properties of iron aluminides, in particular, are dierent from the other intermetallics.These alloys can be also used as functional materials due to their magnetic properties.Iron aluminides are being developed for use as structural materials and/or cladding alloys in fossil energy systems.They have good high temperature mechanical properties and excellent corrosion resistance.These alloys oer relatively low material cost, conservation of strategic elements and a lower density than stainless steels, and thus they have a great potential for substituting steels at elevated temperatures.However, a wider use of these materials is partly hampered by their moderate ductility at ambient temperatures.