Focus

Materials For Energy

This research area focuses on the role of materials in the advancement of new and existing energy sources.

Energy is an area where materials technology plays a particularly important role in meeting the needs of the future. Environmental issues related to energy generation, conservation, and storage will continue to drive the role of materials in energy technology. The high priority of energy makes it important to sustain research, development and modeling of materials for energy applications.

Innovations in Materials Processing

Industrial materials result from a complex series of processing steps that transform natural resources into finished parts or products.

This area of materials science and engineering, known at Materials Processing, can range from refining of the raw materials, to forming the final engineering component into a desired shape, while at the same time achieving the required properties for a given application. Research in this area focuses on the development of new processing techniques or optimization of traditional operations, with the goal of improving materials performance and reliability, while minimizing cost and reducing energy consumption.

Development of Functional Materials

There is an emerging class of materials having physical and chemical properties which are sensitive to changes in the environment such as temperature, pressure, electric field, magnetic field, optical wavelength, and the pH value.

We call these Functional Materials and they are distinctly different from structural materials. This research focuses on the development of new functional materials for application in the areas of information science, communication, microelectronics, medical treatment, life science, energy, and transportation, safety engineering and military technologies.

Integrated Computational Materials Engineering

A key component to materials education and research is understanding how processes produce material structures, how these structures give rise to material properties, and consequently, how best to select a material for a given application.

This research area focuses on how to design materials, and ultimately products, using fundamental and empirical models at multiple length scales that allow engineers to choose the optimal materials and the associated materials processing methods.