Daisuke Okai
Assistant Professor | Ph.D. in Engineering
Materials Design Course
Field of Materials Design
Assistant Professor Daisuke Okai designs seminars and laboratory courses that cultivate students' genuine engagement with materials science. His research addresses the control of crystallographic texture in metallic materials. Electrical steel sheets, composed primarily of iron and silicon, are essential materials for transmitting and harnessing electricity, and his work aims to draw out their full performance through texture control.
Texture Control in Metallic Materials
What students can learn
Most metals encountered in everyday life are polycrystalline. Nearly a century ago, researchers discovered that the individual crystal grains within a metal spontaneously arrange themselves into a statistical distribution of orientations known as "texture." Within the long history of metallurgy, the study of texture represents a comparatively young field, one that unites materials microstructure with statistical analysis. Through research on texture control, students can learn the techniques that underpin the development of advanced metallic materials.
This research develops low-core-loss electrical steel sheets by controlling the crystallographic texture of their constituent grains. Electrical steel sheets serve as the core material in transformers and motors. Although iron naturally favors the {111} crystal orientation, texture control makes it possible to produce {100}-oriented electrical steel sheets; using this orientation in transformer and motor cores is expected to improve their energy conversion efficiency. Because transformers and motors are used extensively worldwide, this research has the potential to contribute significantly to global reductions in CO2 emissions.
