Mengying Liu Publishes Journal Article The assistant professor of engineering examines unseen damage for hydrogen transportation and storage.

By Lily Caldwell
October 21, 2026

Mengying Liu, assistant professor of engineering at Washington and Lee University, and alumni Patrick Schools ’25 and Jacob Jackson ’24 recently published a journal article in the Journal of Materials Research, a peer-reviewed, hybrid academic journal covering materials science and engineering. The article was co-authored alongside Lai Jiang and Michael Demkowicz of Texas A&M University.

The article, titled “Comparative hydrogen embrittlement behavior of alloy 725 by electrochemical and thermal gaseous pre-charging,” evaluates the embrittlement of alloy 725 by exposing the metal to hydrogen-rich environments. The authors compare the effectiveness of electrochemical and gaseous pre-charging, both commonly used methods of hydrogen embrittlement, by examining surface crack formation and interior crack distribution.

The authors found that gaseous pre-charged samples exhibited fewer secondary surface cracks compared to electrochemically pre-charged samples and that internal high local hydrogen concentration did not promote embrittlement with gaseous pre-charging. These findings suggest that the methods are not equivalent, with implications for damage modeling of structural components.

Liu has been a member of the W&L faculty since 2021. She holds a Bachelor of Engineering in materials science and engineering from Tianjin University (China) and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Texas A&M University.

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