Professor Ozevin awarded Department of Defense grant
Assistant Professor Didem Ozevin and a team of faculty members from three departments in the College of Engineering received a new $304,997 grant from the Department of Defense (DoD) entitled “C-Mode Scanning Acoustic Microscope for Understanding Fundamentals of Failure in Military Relevant Materials.”
Principal Investigator Ozevin is joined by co-PI CME and UIC Distinguished Professor Emeritus Alexander Chudnovsky. Senior partners from CME are Assistant Professor Sheng Wei Chi, Associate Professor Eduard Karpov, and Interim Department Head Karl Rockne.
Contributing faculty members from the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering are Assistant Professor Sushant Anand, Professor David He, Associate Professor Reza Shahbazian-Yassar, UIC Distinguished Professor Alexander Yarin and Assistant Professor Jie Xu. Assistant Professor Igor Paprotny from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering rounds out the team.
The objective of the proposal is to understand the performance of new materials and manufacturing processes, and predicting the remaining life of existing structures compromised by service-load induced defects – like fatigue cracks – using novel sensing methods is crucial for the safety of existing and future structural systems utilized by the DoD.
The research and education fields at UIC relevant to the DoD priorities include fatigue and fracture, nondestructive evaluation, new sensors and materials design.
“Our current capabilities restrict the investigation of subsurface defects without destructively testing the materials,” said Ozevin. “The grant will allow us to obtain a Sonoscan Gen6 C-mode Scanning Acoustic Microscope (C-SAM), which is an ultrasonic instrument for studying the internal microstructure of nontransparent solids and composites.”
The microscope will be housed in the UIC Nanotechnology Core Facility, which makes it convenient for faculty members throughout UIC, other universities, and companies in the Chicago region to use the equipment for research and education.
The equipment also will benefit the development of new research areas in the fields of structural materials, platform structures, and naval materials science and technology (Office of Naval Research programs), as well as engineering and complex systems in the physical sciences (Air Force Office of Scientific Research programs) and environmental sciences (ONR, USACE). The C-SAM will be utilized by several researchers in the UIC College of Engineering’s departments of Civil and Materials Engineering, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The grant has the potential to significantly impact the DoD’s objective of improving access to advanced technology in science, technology engineering and mathematics among minority serving institutions (MSI).
UIC is a designated MSI, Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI), and Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) under Title III of the Higher Education Act. It is one of the most diverse research-intensive universities in the United States, ranked 12th for ethnic diversity out of 262 Carnegie classified national institutions by U.S. News and World Report.
Learn more about Professor Ozevin and her research at Ozevin Profile.