Materials Science and Engineering Commons^™

Coercivity Enhancement And Gamma Phase Avoidance Of Alnico Alloys, Li Zhang

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The promotion of social progress requires greater levels of energy efficiency, quality and productivity. However, these developments usually come at the cost of the environment. Green technologies such as electric vehicles, wind turbine and solar panels are ironically overshadowed by supply limitations and high prices of rare earth elements. Therefore, it is important to find alternative materials to replace those that contain critical elements. Alnico alloys show high magnetization, high Curie temperature (800°C) and good corrosion resistance, making it one of the best candidates to replace neodymium-based magnets used in electric vehicles.

In this thesis, methods controlling shape anisotropy and …

Fundamental Problems In Porous Materials: Experiments & Computer Simulation, Zhanping Xu

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Porous materials have attracted massive scientific and technological interest because of their extremely high surface-to-volume ratio, molecular tunability in construction, and surface-based applications. Through my PhD work, porous materials were engineered to meet the design in selective binding, self-healing, and energy damping. For example, crystalline MOFs with pore size spanning from a few angstroms to a couple of nanometers were chemically engineered to show 120 times more efficiency in binding of large molecules. In addition, we found building blocks released from those crystals can be further patched back through a healing process at ambient and low temperatures down to -56 …

Ultrasonic Propagation And Scattering In Pearlitic Steel, Hualong Du

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Diffuse ultrasonic backscatter measurements have been especially useful for extracting microstructural information and for improving flaw detection in materials. In this dissertation, this approach is applied to inspection of railroad wheels. To improve the wear resistance, the tread surfaces of railroad wheels are usually quenched with water to increase the hardness. The pearlite phase of iron, characterized by alternating ferrite and cementite phases, is created by the quenching and the lamellar spacing within grains increases progressively from the quenched tread surface to deeper locations due to the non-uniform cooling rate. The quench depth is an important parameter governing the wheel …

Kolsky Bar Experiment For High-Rate Large Deformations Of Polycarbonate, Jason Gerald Vogeler

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Polycarbonate (PC) is a tough, transparent engineering thermoplastic. Its impact strength and ability undergo large plastic deformations without shatter make PC an ideal protective material for impact-resilient eyewear, aircraft windows and transparent armor. A good understanding of the response of this material to large deformations at high strain rates is critical for its utilization in these applications. To this end, a striker-less Kolsky bar device is employed in this work for the needed material characterization. The apparatus allow impulsive torsion and/or compression loadings with pulse durations sufficiently long for the plastic flow behavior to develop fully. Three new testing techniques …

Kolsky Bar Experiment For High-Rate Large Deformations Of Polycarbonate, Jason G. Vogeler

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Polycarbonate (PC) is a tough, transparent engineering thermoplastic. Its impact strength and ability undergo large plastic deformations without shatter make PC an ideal protective material for impact-resilient eyewear, aircraft windows and transparent armor. A good understanding of the response of this material to large deformations at high strain rates is critical for its utilization in these applications. To this end, a striker-less Kolsky bar device is employed in this work for the needed material characterization. The apparatus allow impulsive torsion and/or compression loadings with pulse durations sufficiently long for the plastic flow behavior to develop fully. Three new testing techniques …

Fabrication And Characterization Of Biocomposites From Polylactic Acid And Bamboo Fibers, Sarah E. Royse

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Environmental concerns have been motivating research in the field of biodegradable materials, especially those from biological sources. Polylactic acid (PLA) is one biopolymer with the potential to replace some standard synthetic polymers. PLA is currently used for fibers, medical sutures, and some packaging, but is still used very little compared with synthetic polymers. One thing that can be done to expand the potential applications of PLA is to add fibers to create composite materials. Bamboo is a good choice for these fibers because it is abundant in many parts of the world, grows very quickly, and is widely unused. Composites …

Magnetic Properties Study Of The Mn-Al System With Additions Of B Or C And Mechanical Milling Techniques, Timothy E. Prost

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Recently a shift in the focus of permanent magnetic research has moved from Rare Earth (RE)-based alloys to those made from more readily available elements. Because of their relatively large magnetocrystalline anisotropy, L1₀ compounds have the potential for use as permanent magnet materials. One particular alloy that is readily available and inexpensive is near equi-atomic manganese and aluminum (Mn₅₀-Al₅₀). First characterized in 1958, it did not receive much attention until more recently when RE supply chain issues made the alloy more attractive for commercial and research applications. The ferromagnetic (FM) τ-phase (L1₀) is …

Effect Of Extracellular Matrix (Ecm) Protein Micropatterns On The Behavior Of Human Neuroblastoma Cells, Ishwari Poudel

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Recent advances in patterning techniques and emerging surface microtechnologies have allowed cell micropatterning to control spatial location of the cells on a surface as well as cell shape, attachment area, and number of contacting neighbor cells. These parameters play important roles in cell cellular behaviors. Cell micropatterning has thus become one of the most important strategies for biomedical applications, such as, tissue engineering, diagnostic immunoassays, lab-on-chip devices, bio-sensing, etc., and cell biology studies as well. For neuronal cells, there have been attempts to distribute neuronal cells on specific patterns to control cell-to-cell interaction. However, there have been very limited understanding …

Strength Of Polycrystalline Ceramics Under Shock Compression, Jianbin Zhu

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Determinations of Some polycrystalline ceramics’ strength properties and inelastic deformation mechanisms in the shocked state are critically important to the design and optimization of armor structures involving these materials. In this work, multiscale modeling and simulations have been carried out to study strength of the effects of polycrystalline microstructure, crystal anisotropy, porosity, and their interactions with microscopic deformation/damage mechanisms on the responses of several polycrystalline ceramics under shock compression and to extract their shock strengths from the wave profiles measured in the related plate impact shock wave experiments.

With a mesoscopic computational model, the roles of intragranular microplasticity and deformation …

Self-Organized Nanolayers Of Organosilane Molecules, Ocelio V. Lima

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

There is a high degree of interest in organic thin films for lightweight, low power, rugged and flexible electronics. Conjugated organic molecules with polycyclic rings are being considered a major enabler of such applications. Due to a surface tension mismatch between the organic molecule with the inorganic support (mainly silicon oxides), molecular packing inside these thin films is often disordered, which suppresses the device performance. There are major efforts focused on modifying the bulk properties, for instance, maximizing orbital overlaps in the solid state, little attention was paid to receive long-range ordered thin films. A novel approach to afford conjugated …

Multiscale Modeling Of Impact On Heterogeneous Viscoelastic Solids With Evolving Microcracks, Flavio V. Souza

Department of Engineering Mechanics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Multiscale computational techniques play a major role in solving problems related to viscoelastic composite materials due to the complexities inherent to these materials. In the present work, a numerical procedure for multiscale modeling of impact on heterogeneous viscoelastic solids containing evolving microcracks is proposed in which the (global scale) homogenized viscoelastic incremental constitutive equations have the same form as the local scale viscoelastic incremental constitutive equations, but the homogenized tangent constitutive tensor and the homogenized incremental history dependent stress tensor depend on the amount of damage accumulated at the local scale. Furthermore, the developed technique allows the computation of the …