Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Research Expo Hot Posters


We put together summaries of a hand full of posters that grad students will present on Thursday at Research Expo. Read about the hot posters here. Below is one such poster...and it has to be hot...just look at the heat pulsing from that photos above. What is it? It's the new composite material...and it's both strong and tough. So look out! And look up more cool posters here.


New Material: Strong and Tough


NanoEngineers have created a new class of materials that are both incredibly strong and tough — an attribute combination that has traditionally been difficult to find in the same material. The new structural materials, which could find their way into aerospace and biomedical applications, are lighter than steel and twice as strong. The materials withstand high stress without permanent deformation; and when they do deform, they bend before they break. The materials are relatively inexpensive because they are made from materials already used in titanium alloys. NanoEngineering Ph.D. Hesham Khalifa, working in NanoEngineering Department Chair, Professor Kenneth Vecchio’s research group, helped create the new one-step process for fabricating these “bulk metallic glass composite materials.” The materials were formulated on the computer, using modeling approaches to properly design nanoscale atomic clusters. A next step in the research is to begin customizing bulk metallic glass composites with tailored properties. One possibility: a metallic material with stiffness that begins to approach that of human bone and could be used in bone-implant technologies of the future.

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