Prof. Dr. Riping Liu received his PH.D In 1998 from Institute of Physics, CAS, and then worked in the Institute of Space Simulation, German Aerospace Center as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, and continued his research in Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy, University of Cambridge. He got his professor position for materials science from 2000 in Yanshan University.
As the main founder of the State Key Laboratory of Metastable Materials, He has taken the role of the director since its establishment in 2001. He has promoted the development of the metastable science as an important research field in materials science. Under his leadership, the state key laboratory is currently one of the best laboratories of materials science in China.
He devoted his research on materials science and technology in space in his earlier period of scientific career. He took part in many national key projects doing materials science research using Chinese recoverable satellites and spacecrafts, which laid a solid foundation of materials science and technology in space in China, especially on production of novel alloys under microgravity conditions.
He successfully established the strengthening and toughening approaches and made a breakthrough of preparation technology for Zr alloys, and invented some new Zr alloys with many desirable properties, such as good corrosion resistance to atomic oxygen, excellent anti-irradiation, low expansion coefficient, low density, resistance to severe friction and cold welding, to replace the currently used steel in making moving parts for spacecrafts. 30% weight of space mechanism parts was reduced comparing with the traditional alloy steels.
He developed some key materials for the space environment detection and successfully applied them in space to obtain real-time space atomic oxygen and radiation data, which strongly supported the design of the spacecrafts in China.
He has won 2 National Science and Technology Awards and 4 provincial and ministerial scientific Awards; authorized 27 invention patterns, and published 3 monographs and more than 300 SCI indexed papers in Phys. Rev. Lett., Acta Mater. et al. He worked as the chairman of the first International Forum of metastable materials and gave keynote or invited talks in the international conferences for more than 20 times.