Viktor Ivanovich Trefilov (born 6.08.1930) is a Soviet physicist, an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1973) and its vice-president (from 1974). He was born in Baku. He graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic Institute (1952). In 1955-73 he worked at the Institute of Metal Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, and from 1973 he has been director of the Institute for Problems of Materials Science of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.
His research concerned metal physics, the physics of the strength and plasticity of metals and refractory materials, physical materials science and powder metallurgy. He studied the development of phase transformations in steels, titanium alloys and other metals at high rates of heating and cooling, the processes of austenite formation, and the electrothermal treatment of steel. He studied the mechanism of deformation and fracture of transition metals with a body-centred cubic lattice and the various types of dislocation structures that arise in deformation. He extended (1968-70) the theory of the ductile-brittle transition, which takes into account the influence on the cold-brittleness temperature of structural and substructural factors and of the features of the electronic structure of crystals; he was the first to show (1963) that the formation of cellular dislocation structures leads not only to an increase in strength but also to a reduction in cold-brittleness, and he worked out optimal regimes of thermomechanical treatment of chromium, molybdenum and tungsten. He laid (1968-75) the foundations of the technology of production and processing of refractory metals. In particular, he created a series of alloys based on chromium, molybdenum, tungsten and other refractory metals with an increased level of physical and mechanical properties.
He carried out work on the synthesis of diamonds and diamond-like compounds. He was the first to develop the physical principles for producing “viscous” ceramics, including those based on diamonds and other superhard materials.
State Prize of the Ukrainian SSR (1974).