Dr. Mile Djurdjević

ORCID logo https://orcid.org/0009-0007-4561-3547

Dr. Mile B. Djurdjević was born in June 1958 in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. He finished elementary school in Belgrade in 1973, and high school (2nd Belgrade Gymnasium) in 1977. He entered the Faculty of Technology and Metallurgy, University of Belgrade in 1977, where he graduated in 1983 at the Department of Foundry. He completed his master's (1989) and doctoral (1993) studies at the Department of Iron and Steel Metallurgy. In the period from 1985 to 1996, he worked at the Department of Iron and Steel Metallurgy, Faculty of Technology and Metallurgy in Belgrade, where he was appointed to all positions from assistant-trainee (1985) to assistant professor (1993).

From September 1996 until April 2004, he was working as a lecturer at the University of Windsor, Canada, at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Materials, and the Auto Industry. At the same time, the Ford Motor Company hired him to work as a researcher on the development of new alloys and casting technologies for the auto industry, which will enable the production of a new generation of gasoline engines that will have lower consumption and emit fewer harmful gases during exploitation.

At the beginning of 2004, at the invitation of Prof. Reiner Schmid-Fetzera, from the Institute of Metallurgy, Technical University Clausthal, Germany, he started a two-year project in the field of developing magnesium-based alloys for the thixocasting process. One of his activities was related to the improvement of the existing PANDAT software for the calculation of multi-component phase diagrams and the development of the necessary database for magnesium-based alloys.

Ford Motor Company together with the Mexican company Alfa (GERMANY) bought an aluminum foundry in Wernigerode, Germany, in early 2006 and invited Mile Djurdjević to form a research team and coordinate scientific research work with renowned scientific research institutions in Germany. Since April 2006, he has been working as a leading researcher - expert in the company NEMAK (in its research and development department), which is the world leader in the production of aluminum castings for the auto industry.

In the middle of 2008, he moved to Linz, Austria, where he got the position of knowledge manager for Nemak Europe company. Currently, Dr. Mile Djurdjevic is working at Nemak Linz as a senior research engineer, being responsible for running various research projects related to the development of new aluminum alloys and casting processes. And here, in addition to working in the industry, Mile Djurdjevic is employed at the University of Upper Austria, where he lectures in undergraduate studies at the Department of Materials.

Mile Djurdjevic is one of the world's most notable experts in the field of thermal analysis application in the aluminum casting industry. Together with a group of researchers from Canada, he developed a thermal analysis device that can detect more than 30 characteristic points on the cooling curve and relate them to the corresponding metallurgical properties of the investigated aluminum alloy.

Mile Djurdjevic was a mentor for over 50 bachelor's and 15 master's theses, as well as a mentor for 3 doctoral theses. To date, Mile Djurdjevic has published over 170 papers in reference international journals. The basic areas of Mile Djurdjević's scientific work are: (i) physical-chemical changes in the melting of alloys based on aluminum, magnesium, and iron, (ii) thermodynamics and kinetics of phase transformations of multicomponent metal systems, (iii) solidification and kinetics of multicomponent metal systems, (iv) modeling of state diagrams of multicomponent systems, (v) application of thermal analysis as an on-line tool in quality control of metal melts.