DMI/MEMS Seminar Presented by Prof Brian L. Wardle

Abstract: Bulk nanostructured materials offer tremendous opportunity for re-inventing materials, but also pose challenges both in terms of characterization, design, processing, and scaling. This talk will present recent work developing nanoengineered hierarchical advanced (aerospace-grade) composites with enhanced mechanical properties, with a focus on imparting multifunctionality. Such hybrid advanced composites employ aligned nanofibers (in most of our work, aligned carbon nanotubes, A-CNTs) in several architectures to enhance \ bulk properties of existing aerospace-grade advanced composites. Building multifunctionality concurrent with these mechanical property improvements includes thermal and electrical conductivity tailoring for ice protection, damage sensing, and self-manufacturing, among others. For example, out-of-oven (OoO) manufacturing utilizes conductive heating from flexible nanostructured CNT films to conductively, rather than convectively, heat the composite, resulting in 2-3 orders of magnitude reduction in required energy, opening up new possibilities in areas such as accelerated curing, autoclave-free processing, and cure sensing. Fundamental studies on polymer-nanofiber interactions via variable-volume fraction (vol%) A-CNT polymer nanocomposites, including processing limits to ultra-high vol% systems, led to the development of a combined top-down and bottom-up fabrication methodology that addresses several of the key issues (agglomeration, viscosity, scale, alignment) that have frustrated the use of nanomaterials in bulk materials. New research in related areas including carbon nanostructure catalysis, nanomaterials in microelectronics and energy storage, 3D damage progression via x-ray tomography, and new work in boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) will be introduced if time allows.