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Mission

Our broad mission is to seek an understanding of the interplay of the structure, processing and properties of materials. The role that defects play in influencing material behavior and the development of methods to locate and identify defects are of particular interest.

Overview

A primary thrust of our lab is the examination of material processing-structure-property relationships.  The processing of materials and their structures influence the mechanical and physical properties. This is true for metals, polymers and ceramics. Ceramics and their composites can be processed in a variety of ways and their structure can be altered and controlled as well. This can have a significant effect on the mechanical, thermal and physical behavior of these materials. High temperature ceramics are of great interest for their use in aerospace, space and defense applications. Our focus is on the science of processing and the micromechanics of ceramic composites with the objective of tailoring the effective mechanical and physical properties of high temperature ceramics and composites.

Another thrust of our research is the non-destructive evaluation of materials and real-time structural health monitoring. Locating and identifying defects in load bearing structures is critical for establishing the viability of the structures and estimating their remaining life. Ultrasonic methods provide a very effective approach to performing this task as they offer the benefits of non-invasiveness and real-time monitoring. Guided waves can interrogate structures over large areas and can identify a large variety of defects. Such waves can also determine the state of stress in structures through the acoustoelastic effect. Our research aims to take advantage of the many features of ultrasonic guided waves to examine their interaction with defects in metallic structures, composite laminates, and hybrid structures. The mechanics of wave propagation and interaction with defects is studied analytically and numerically. 

Facilities

Acoustics and Ultrasound Lab (Drosdick Hall 305)

• Polytec Doppler Vibrometer System
• Agilent Signal Analyzer
• Agilent 80 MHz Function/Arbitrary Waveform Generator
• National Instrument PXI-5105 100 MS/s Data Acquisition System

Materials Testing Laboratory (Drosdick Hall 003)

• Instron Tension/Torsion machine
• MTS 810 servohydraulic tester
• Tinius Olsen 60 Kip compression/tension tester

High Resolution Microscopy (HRM) Laboratory (Drosdick Hall 004)

• Hitachi S-4800 high resolution SEM
• Agilent 5500 AFM