Towards Nanomanufacturing of Materials with Coherent Interfaces

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Rapid innovations in today's manufacturing technologies and the need for superior performance are pushing the boundaries for advancing next generation materials. Due to extreme operational demands, current service components warrant a favorable combination of high strength, ductility and cracking resistance. Nanostructured materials have the potential to meet these technological demands if they can be designed to possess these properties and manufactured at large enough scale. The design of new materials, however, has traditionally been a highly iterative and costly process, and thus the development of computational models can greatly reduce the cost of development and deployment of advanced materials. This award supports research that will advance knowledge of nanoscale processing routes while simultaneously developing more predictive modeling methods.? The integrated processing and modeling approach will expedite materials design while eliminating excessive processing and characterization trials.? Moreover, this research will result in high fidelity tools for material lifetime prediction for critical applications in civil, aerospace, naval structures, nuclear plants and ground vehicles, with the potential to improve safety and eliminate premature retirement of materials. ?This research draws upon collaborative approaches in Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering, and integrates computational and experimental approaches, ensuring that students involved in this research will be fluent in both. The intellectual challenge to be addressed by this research involves harnessing processing methods to generate microstructures with tightly controlled coherent interface populations, thus enabling a systematic understanding of dislocation/interface reactions under complex cyclic loading conditions. This research will enable control of physical vapor deposition routes to deposit heavily twinned microstructures with narrow spatial distributions at the nanoscale, which will allow expansion of the material systems that can be induced to possess the promising nanotwin microstructure, including materials with higher intrinsic stacking fault energies.? By probing highly controlled nanotwinned microstructures, the research team will establish the attributes for a nanotwinned material to achieve higher fatigue resistance while also limiting variability in fatigue lives.? Integration of processing, microstructural characterization and mechanical testing into a multiscale modeling framework will ultimately allow for convergence to optimum microstructures and compositions in a timely fashion, potentially eliminating the need to perform exhaustive testing for each new processing parameter or composition. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.