Researcher awarded $510,000 grant to develop shatter-resistant ceramics
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Due to their exceptionally high operating temperatures, ceramics are used in various applications, from power generation to advanced aerospace technologies.
“Ceramics have a lot of attractive properties as they are really hard, stiff, and often chemically inert,” said Associate Professor Matthew Daly, director of the Advanced Materials Microstructures Lab (AMML) at UIC. “These properties compare favorably to other familiar engineering materials such as metals, and so there’s great interest in developing structural ceramics, particularly for service at extreme temperatures where metals soften and melt.”
However, ceramics have one fatal flaw – they easily shatter. In comparison to metals, ceramics lack the same ability to deform without fracture. Daly and his team want to develop ceramics that overcome this deficiency.
“What we are trying to do with our research is find ways to make ceramics more like metals. If you were to drop a glass, I think we could all agree that we would like it if it were less likely to shatter and more likely to dent,” Daly said.
When manufactured, ceramics are depleted of key material features, known as dislocations, which are plentiful in metals and allow them to deform. Daly and his team want to develop ceramics that prevent depletion of this critical material feature.
“We’re trying to find a way to inject those key features into ceramics and preserve them in a way that would allow the material to behave more like a metal,” he said.
The research is supported by a new $510,246 grant titled “R2-D2 C-3PO: Research for Robust Dislocation-Dense Ceramics via Coldspray Collision Process Optimization,” funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Daly is partnering with the University of Minnesota, Florida International University, Solvus Global, and Citrine Informatics, for this effort.
“Our role is to focus on mechanical testing and material characterization to provide principles for elevating the possibilities of what ceramics can do,” said Jungsub Lee, a postdoctoral associate at AMML.
“UIC’s facilities, including the Electron Microscopy Core and its capability to observe dislocations in ceramics at high temperatures, are key to enabling this research,” Daly added.
If the researchers are successful, it has the potential to impact a variety of fields and industries.
“There isn’t one particular application that we’re trying to enable. This research can be used in many ways, like in power generation, where one of the key things that limits how efficiently we can extract energy from the fuel source is the temperature limits placed on the components of turbines,” Daly said. “If we’re successful, we could possibly double the operating temperature, which would represent a radical leap forward in potential efficiency gains.”
The new ceramics could also be used in space exploration, where the high temperatures encountered during atmospheric re-entry represent an ongoing issue for spacecraft.
“In materials, this is a grand challenge,” Daly said. “If we can solve this problem and make ceramics more shatter-resistant, it will change the field.”