Marc Leparoux is head of the group Nanoparticles & Nanocomposites at the Laboratory for Advanced Materials Processing at Empa. He received his Magistère in Materials Science and a DEA in Solid Chemistry in 1992 at University of Rennes and then his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry in 1995 from the University of Orléans in France. His PhD performed at CNRS with the Snecma Group was dealing with gaseous phase deposition processes (CVD, CVI) for elaborating ceramic composite materials. He then worked on high temperature process monitoring at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology (IWS) in Dresden (Germany). He joined Empa in 2001 where he developed the activities on thermal plasma synthesis of nanoparticles. Particularly, his interest is in gas phase process understand-ing and improvement based on in-situ characterization using various optical methods, among them emission and absorption spectroscopy as well as high speed imaging. These techniques are presently also used in other plasma induced processes as for instance in Laser metal welding and more recently in Laser metal deposition an additive manufacturing process. His team is indeed developing a blown-powder additive manufacturing prototype equipped with many monitoring techniques and special powder transport systems.

Finally, Marc Leparoux is also investigating metal matrix composites, mainly aluminium and titanium alloys, reinforced with own produced or commercial available nanoparticles. Using a simple powder metallurgy approach, he was able with his team to significantly increase the strength and hardness of aluminium based nanocomposites. For instance, for an Al-5xxx matrix, yield strength of 450 MPa with over 10% elongation at rupture can be tailored in a simple near net-shape process. Transfer to other matrices as well as assessment of weldability or further processing steps are on-going.