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SHI Changxu: China’s Superalloy Hero
XIN Ling (staff reporter)
Prof. Shi Changxu (Chang-hsu Shih), laureate of the State Top Scientific and
Technological Award for 2010, is regarded as a pioneer in the development of superalloys in
China and a world-class master of materials science with excellent leadership and strategic
insights. In the 1960s, he and his colleagues worked out the first generation air-cooled
nickel-based superalloy turbine blades for domestic fighter aircrafts which greatly enhanced
the aeroengines’ performance. Via the effective control of trace elements, he developed
the low segregation technology to reduce the segregation of superalloys, for which the
International Union of Materials Research Societies honored him with the “Innovations in
Real Materials Award” in 1998. He advocated and promoted the research and development
of carbon fibers and magnesium alloys in China as well as the establishment of the Chinese
Academy of Engineering. Today, 30 years after retirement, Prof. Shi still works every day in
his office to read latest research results, write advisory proposals and meet young visitors to
give them his best support.
The Superalloy Hero
For almost half a century, Shi Changxu has worked
diligently to develop different superalloys and pushed the
industrialization of their achievements.
In 1955, when Shi returned from the US, he was
assigned to the Institute of Metal Research (IMR),
Chinese Academy of Sciences in northeastern China’s
Shenyang City. As head of the superalloy research team,
he devoted himself to the development of iron-based
superalloys which were used to forge aircraft turbo disks
due to shortage of nickel and chromium at that time in
China.
In 1964, Shi was invited to participate in an
extremely challenging task: to invent a novel type of
superalloy turbo for China’s new generation fighter
aircrafts. According to plan, Shi and coworkers were
going to replace the traditional solid forged turbine disks
with hollow cast blades so that they could stand much
higher temperature and pressure. It was the first time Shi
heard of such blades, and what he had in his hand was
only a sketch drawing.
To crack the hard nut, a special taskforce was
gathered at IMR, and Shi, leader of the taskforce, worked
with over a hundred scientists and engineers in a shabby
116 Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Prof. SHI Changxu
laboratory day and night to design the turbo, managing
to make nine tiny holes evenly on a 100 mm-long blade
with the holes’ minimum diameter at 0.8 mm. Within
less than a year, with the collaboration of blade designers
and manufacture engineers, the air-cooled nickel-based
superalloy turbo was successfully developed, a milestone
technological advancement making China the second
nation in the world to use hollow cast turbine blades for
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aeroengines, only five years later than the US.
“The responsibility and pressure was no doubt heavy
on me,” Prof. Shi recalled with a smile, “but I believe in
painstaking work – since US colleagues have succeeded,
we can make it too.”
When the blades were put into operation in 1966, they
proved to meet all technical requirements and elevated
the turbo’s inlet air temperature by some 100 °C. “They
haven’t led to a single fight failure or accident over these
years, and are still used on the best flight aircrafts in
China today,” the professor noted proudly.
Besides the superalloys for military and civilian
People
use, Shi’s group also worked out corrosion resisting
superalloys and alloy steels for utility gas turbine and
urea production facilities, high-strength alloy steels for
making industrial furnaces and submarine masts, as well
as alloy steels that can resist magnetization and extreme
temperatures.
Under Shi’s leadership, the CAS Institute of Metal
Corrosion and Prevention (now a state key laboratory
affiliated to IMR) was founded in Shenyang in 1982, and
a national network on material environmental corrosion
was set up to accumulate scientific data for the study and
application of materials science.
A Strategic Scientist
After serving at IMR for about three decades, in the
spring of 1984, Prof. Shi moved to Beijing to chair the
Academic Division of Technological Sciences at CAS
headquarters. Two years later, he was appointed deputy
director of the newly established National Natural Science
Foundation of China (NSFC).
Shi was actively involved in the groundbreaking work
for the early growth of NSFC. He won over 2% funds of
the “State High-Tech Research and Development Program”
for NSFC to support scientific studies with novel notions
or concepts. With the fund, from 1986 to 2000, some 200
million RMB were earmarked for over 2,000 research
programs that cultivated new technologies and young
scientists. He participated in the drafting of the National
Long-term Development Outline for Science and Technology
in 1988 and chaired the plan of the New Materials program in
1983. He not only presided over the compilation of the first
“Guide for NSFC Programs” and the strategic development
plans for over 50 disciplines, but promoted the publication
of “Science Foundation in China” and “Progress in Natural
Science” to provide a communication platform for scientists
and Foundation officials.
As a bold organizer and strategic scientist, Shi has
a broad scientific vision focused on but not limited to
superalloy study. In fact, his insights into the strategic
development of many other materials have proved sagacious.
Carbon fibers are strong, light and expensive fibers
that have a wide application in aerospace and automobile
manufacturing. Due to their massive military use, the sale
and technological transfer of carbon fibers are prohibited to
China. Chinese scientists began to study polyacrylonitrilebased carbon fibers in 1962, but saw no substantial
development progress throughout the following decades.
In 2000, at the bottom of carbon fiber development in
China, eighty-year-old Shi decided to take up the challenge
and save the situation. “First we have to call in experts and
Prof. SHI (3rd from right) conducting a survey of enterprises.
spell out the existing problems”, he told a high official of
NSFC. Based on the major reasons for the failure of carbon
fiber industry in China which were identified during an expert
meeting in August, 2000, Shi and his colleagues handed in a
development proposal to relevant government departments.
Next January, Shi wrote a letter to then President JIANG
Zemin, asking to boost the research and development
of high-performance carbon fibers in China. With Shi’s
untiring promotion and coordination, in October, 2001, a
special program was set up by the Ministry of Science and
Technology for carbon fiber study. Since then, more and
more projects on carbon fibers have received funds from
NSFC and the central government, and China has achieved
remarkable advances in carbon fiber industry. Some domestic
manufacturers have started massive production, which broke
the monopoly of developed countries like Japan and the US.
Shi emphasizes academic cooperation. In 1986 he
established the Chinese Materials Union, which became
Chinese Materials Research Society (CMRS) in 1991.
He also attaches great importance to the development
of biomedical materials in China, seeing it as a vital
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undertaking for the health of 1.3 billion people. Thanks
to his coordination efforts, the Chinese Committee for
Biomaterials was established in 1997. In 2004, he led
a Chinese delegation to win the bid for the 9th World
Biomaterials Congress which will be held in southwest
China’s Chengdu in June, 2012.
“Patriotism, My Unfailing Faith”
Prof. Shi in his nineties is still energetically working at
the frontier of materials science and industry. In 2010, he
went on almost a dozen of trips, attending conferences and
visiting organizations from the northeastern city of Harbin
to the southmost provincial capital of Guangzhou.
“If you ask what’s pushed me moving on and on, I’d
say it’s the love of my nation, and the faith that China must
be strong – from I was a kid.”
Born in a literary family in a village of north China’s
Hebei Province in 1920, Shi Changxu lived a quiet but happy
childhood in the backyard of his 40-member extended family,
enjoying reading alone and getting to know the chaos in the
outside world. “As a primary school student I was by no
means clever, but I managed to make it up with diligence.”
Years later, the Japanese invasion shattered Shi’s plan of
becoming a primary school teacher to support his family after
graduation, and he had to flee home like a refugee to avoid
the press gang. When he went through all kinds of hardships
and was finally admitted to the National Northwestern
Engineering College in south of Shaanxi Province , he chose
to study metallurgy because “at that time many young people
believed they can save the nation by engaging in industry”.
The war left a deep scar on Shi’s heart, driving him to a life-
long conviction – to love his country, and do everything he
can to make his country strong.
Shi graduated from Northwestern Engineering College
as one of the top students, and worked two years before he
acquired a chance for further education in the US. From
1948 to 1952, Shi Changxu first studied metallurgy at
University of Missouri and then obtained a PhD degree
from the University of Notre Dame. After the foundation
of “Red China” and the outbreak of the Korean War, about
5,000 Chinese students including Shi Changxu were held by
the American government and not allowed to go home.
Shi had no choice but to work as a research associate
at MIT for the time being. But he had never given up the
intent to come home and organized several attempts to
reveal the obstruction of the US government.
In 1955, days before Shi Changxu was to return China,
his supervisor Prof. Morris Cohen at MIT asked if it was
the position or money problem that would take away one
of his favorite students. “No, professor. It’s only because
compared with the US, my motherland now needs me
more,” Shi answered. “The love is here in my heart, and it
will never fade away,” Prof. Shi’s wrinkled but determined
face makes him look so gracious.
The “Beauty Heart Radish”
Gentle, helpful and modest: Prof. Shi has been an
inspiring figure to all who knew and worked with him. They
even gave him a nickname – the “beauty heart radish”, a
local vegetable they all like to eat.
“The professor has a beautiful mind that never envies
or resents. He respects everybody and treats them equally,”
says Prof. LI Yiyi, who is a former student of Prof. Shi at
IMR and now a senior researcher and CAS member. “The
distance between his house and his office in Shenyang was
no more than 200 meters, but he often spent more than half
an hour on the way because many colleagues and workers
came up to chat with him.”
When Li began to work as the academic secretary of Prof.
Shi’s research laboratory in 1964, she found her leader very
modest and gave her enough space to carry out her duties. “The
professor always supports our new ideas even it’s a bad one, so
it’s very pleasant and comfortable to work with him.”
118 Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
According to YUAN Haibo, an ex-secretary-general
of NSFC, “kindness is the quality that impressed me most
during the 20-odd years I worked with him. Wherever he
was, his kindness and leadership can naturally draw people
around and connect all forces to achieve success.”
Yuan admired Prof. Shi’s rigorous scholarship. He
remembered once he handed in the Collection of Scientific
and Technological Research Outcomes for Prof. Shi to read
through. To his surprise, the professor proofread the papers
paragraph by paragraph, including the English titles of each
research program.
Despite his age, Shi now still writes nearly all reports
and speeches by himself.
In his memoirs Prof. Shi wrote, “A man shall first set
a proper outlook on his life and contribute to the human
society. As a Chinese we must make contributions to our
country, that’s all that matters to me.”
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People
Approaching the Secret of Catalysis
—— Chemical physicist LI Can’s pursuit
SONG Jianlan (staff reporter)
On July 16, 2004 at the 13th International Congress
on Catalysis (ICC) in Paris, Prof. LI Can received the
International Catalysis Award from Prof. Michele Che,
President of the International Association of Catalysis
Societies (IACS), and became the first scientist from
the developing world to win this honor. Also at this
conference, Li was elected Vice President of IACS, which
automatically put him into the position of IACS President
four years later in 2008.
The International Catalysis Award, which is deemed
to be the highest of catalysis science, is an honor given by
IACS to recognize internationally outstanding achievements
in the field. Only one nominee who is supposed to be under
age 45 could be crowned with this prize every four years.
Li, a chemical physicist renowned for his contributions
to catalytic materials, catalytic reaction and catalytic
characterization research, is the first in the world to have
successfully applied UV Raman spectroscopy to catalysis
and materials research. His smart strategy to collect
Raman spectra in the UV region can effectively bypass the
interference from fluorescence mostly occurring in visible
region, and meanwhile greatly improve the sensitivity
of detection via UV resonance Raman Effect, benefiting
from the shorter wavelengths of the excitation laser in this
region. Breaking a major bottleneck barrier, his invention
of UV Raman Spectrograph has made possible a series of
important breakthroughs in fundamental catalysis research.
Li has kept in the spotlight over the past few years:
Prof. Li gives a 60-minute lecture titled “Catalysis in microand meso-pore: UV Raman identification of active sites
and confinement effects in chiral synthesis” at the awarding
ceremony of the 13th ICC.
he was elected a Foreign Member of Academia Europaea
in 2008, a Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry and a
Member of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing
World (TWAS) in 2005 and a Member of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2003. It is not easy
to conceive, however, that Li has got to this height
of academic fame from a remote village on the Hexi
Corridor of China, also commonly known as Hosi
Corridor; and he almost lost the opportunity to pursue
any academic career.
Obscure Origin
Born in a farmer’s family of Yongchang County, Gansu
Province in 1960, Li spent his childhood with great hardship.
In 1976 when he finished his high school, no access to any
higher education was available amid the ruins left behind
by the so-called “Cultural Revolution.” Fortunately he did
not wait too long to see the dawn. On a big day of 1977, the
former president of his high school personally rode a long
way to Li’s village to inform him with the resuming of the
National University Entrance Examination, a merit-based
recruiting system for colleges and universities which was,
and still is the only practical pathway for students of a minor
origin to go to colleges. The old president deemed Li as the
most intelligent student in his school and thought it would be
a great pity if Li missed the bus.
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In the year of 1978, Li got the admission to the
Department of Chemistry at the Zhangye Normal Institute,
the nowadays Hexi University in Zhangye City of Gansu
Province. He cherished this hard-earned chance and spared
no efforts to improve his academic know-how in chemistry.
His diligence kept him so excellent a student that he had
scarcely graduated when the Institute employed him as a
teacher. A year later he obtained an opportunity to study at
the Shannxi Normal University, where his enthusiasm for
catalysis research was triggered by a paper entitled Atomic
Clusters in Relations to Catalysis and Surface Sciences by
Prof. ZHANG Dayu, a renowned scientist from the Dalian
Institute of Chemistry and Physics (DICP) under CAS, and
decided to pursue research in this field.
This passion for catalysis research has never withered
away. “Catalysts can have magical effects on chemical
reactions. This phenomenon itself is intriguing, and it would
be great fun to unveil its secret. Moreover, its vital role in
building human society has also fueled me with enduring
interests,” Li remarks when asked what has driven him all
the way through thick and thin over the past decades in
catalysis research.
This very enthusiasm guided him to another turning
point in the year 1983: Li passed the entrance exam and was
admitted as a postgraduate student at the DICP. This lent
him a stepping stone to the sanctum of science.
Early Research
When he was pursuing his PhD at DICP, Li met
with Prof. Takaharu Onishi from the Tokyo Institute of
Technology (TIT), a well renowned catalysis expert in
Japan, who was then visiting DICP and appreciated Li’s
research very much. Before long, with Prof. Onishi’s
recommendation, Li attained a UNESCO scholarship to
study at the TIT for one year, in the capacity of a PhD
candidate jointly trained by DICP and TIT.
At TIT, Li conducted a systematic study on the surface
properties and catalytic mechanisms of rare-earth cerium
oxide, the vital component of catalysts for removing
pollutant gases from vehicle exhausts. During this period,
he published eight papers in international journals including
J.Am.Chem.Soc. Some of these papers have become
fundamental literature for subsequent studies on the threeway catalysts for reducing exhaust pollutants.
After finishing his work in Japan, Li came back to
DICP and began to build up his own research laboratory/
group in China. In 1989, Li won the financial support from
the “Youth Scientist Foundation,” a newly established
foundation under the National Natural Science Foundation
of China (NSFC). “It was the first independent project
I have ever gained. The funding timely met my urgent
needs and greatly refueled my enthusiasm. At that time
50,000 yuan was a big sum of money; it would allow me to
concentrate on research in the following three years without
financial worries,” Li reviews with appreciation.
The following three years proved to be rewarding. Li
made a series of breakthroughs in the research on oxidation
and activation of methane. By the aid of isotope labeling
and high- and low-temperature in situ spectroscopic
technique, he successfully characterized a series of oxygen
species, including peroxide, superoxide and their transition
mechanisms and catalytic activity; he also observed the
active species of adsorbed methane on catalysts, particularly
the distorted structure of adsorbed methane induced by active
oxygen species on the surface of catalysts. As a result, his
work was rewarded with the CAS Natural Science Awards of
1993 when he was promoted to a full professor in DICP and
became one of the youngest professors in the institute.
UV Raman Spectroscopy
The in situ characterization of catalysts is a fundamental
basis of catalysis science, and Raman spectroscopy is
thought to have great potential in this field. However,
application of Raman spectra to scientific research was
once seriously hindered by strong fluorescence interference,
making this issue an important but challenging subject
of catalysis science. When performing a visiting research
program in 1995 at Northeastern University in USA, Li and
120 Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
his American colleagues made some initial progress in this
realm. When he went back to China, Li won the support
from the NSFC “Outstanding Young Scientist Foundation”
in 1996 and formally launched a project to develop a UV
Raman Spectroscopy for catalysis researches, inspired by
his team’s discovery that obtaining Raman spectra of some
different kinds of catalysts in the UV region can effectively
bypass the fluorescence inference. Based on this strategy
Vol.25 No.2 2011
they invented the first set of UV spectrograph in China for
catalysis in situ observation and characterization. Because
of the shorter wavelengths and the possibility to obtain UV
resonance Raman Effect in the UV region, this technique
can greatly improve the sensitivity of detection. This
invention has since led to a series of great advances in this
field of research.
In the subsequent years, Li’s research team successfully
applied this new technology to catalysis research, and
made progress in in situ characterization of catalysts and
catalytic active sites with their different species, like the
coke deposition on catalysts, synthesis of molecular sieves,
transition metal-substituted molecular sieves and phase
transformation of oxide catalysts. In particular, their work
on identifying the transition metal atoms incorporated in
molecular sieves have received special attention from the
international catalysis community, being seen as a most
reliable method to identify the highly isolated active sites in
zeolites.
Li’s work on UV Raman Spectroscopy and related
discoveries were also highly recognized in China: the UV
Raman spectrograph and the spectroscopic study on catalysts
won a National Award for S&T Inventions in 1999.
People
and immobilization of chiral homogeneous catalysts (e.g.,
Sharpless and Mn(salen) complexes) into mesoporous
materials through organo-inorganic hybrid and chemical
grafting. This work has led to a significant improvement
of the enantioselectivity of heterogeneous catalysts for
the chiral epoxidation of olefins in the pores, and chiral
hydrogenation of ketenes. His persistent pursuit earned him
the International Catalysis Award.
Li and his team have developed a series of heteropolytungstate
oxidation catalysts and a green, ultra-deep desulfurization
process, based on an oxidation-extraction approach. This
technology is capable of cutting the sulfur content from several
hundred-ppm ranges down to only a few ppms. This work was
highlighted by the Green Chemistry in 2004, and is now under
pilot test in SINOPEC.
Prof. LI and his colleagues have developed a UV Raman
spectroscopy technique for in situ characterization of
catalyst phase structure. Shown here is the surface phase
transformation of TiO2 observed by UV Raman Spectroscopy,
which is more sensitive at the surface region than in the bulk of
the metal oxide.
Based on the above technology, Li and his team
made several other achievements, including the successful
synthesis of novel catalysts for selective oxidations
incorporated with atomically isolated transition metal ions
Prof. Li at his laboratory
High-efficiency Production of Hydrogen via Solar Light
Apparently Li has never contented with his own
achievements. He has been focusing on another challenging
and long-term subject since 2001: to raise the efficiency
of hydrogen production powered by solar light. Ways as
cheap and effective as photosynthesis to transform solar
energy into more convenient forms of chemical energy, like
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storable hydrogen, represent an unconquerable pinnacle
for science, and a long-harbored dream of humankind. Li
has focused his attention to photocatalytic production of
hydrogen from water using solar energy. He dreams of
developing novel photocatalysts with low-cost and highefficiency to convert solar energy to solar fuels and solar
electricity.
Li’ team has made great efforts in solar energy research
including photocatalytic material synthesis, photocatalyst
characterization and photocatalysis mechanism understanding.
Recently the team saw progress in their work on cocatalyst
and developed a type of Pt-PdS/CdS three-component
photocatalysts, based on Li’s strategy of dual cocatalysts. In
2009 the team achieved a quantum efficiency of 93% in their
experiment using Na2S as sacrifice. This marked the highest
that time in the field. Actually this efficiency approaches that of
the initial photosynthesis progress in nature. Before Li’s work,
the highest quantum efficiency in photocatalytic hydrogen
production was about 60%.
“We could not believe our eyes at first,” Li recollected
when talking about their encouraging progress, with a
radiance of happiness: “we were not reassured until this
efficiency was frequently reproduced in our subsequent
experiments and in other laboratories.”
Li’s work is thought to have opened a new way to
design high-efficiency artificial photocatalysts. It also
provides a green, energy-saving technology to transform
122 Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Li talking with students
pollutants like hydrosulfide, and meanwhile to produce
hydrogen. It has promising future and the team is making
pilot experiments for its industrial application.
“Catalysis keeps producing substantial techniques
for the economic development of human society with its
magical efficacy,” Li introduces when talking about the
great importance of catalysis research: “Actually it sits at
the core of chemistry and deserves lifetime pursuit.”
Continuing his catalysis research, Li lives a simple
but productive life, busy every day reviewing literature,
thinking over research approaches and discussing with
students. “Actually,” Li remarks: “this peaceful and plain
lifestyle is the biggest pleasure for me.”