Artificial Materials: Fabrication and Property Evaluation

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9972620Halloran'Artificial Materials' could become a new class of engineering materials with unprecedented properties. An Artificial Material is a designed structure, built on a very fine scale. It consists of one or several ordinary substances arranged according to a sophisticated design that leads to the unique macroscopic properties. The designers of Artificial Materials promise "pre-determined" properties. They have shown, theoretically, how to choose a particular property tensor, and design a structure that will display exactly those properties. This concept has outstanding potential for Materials Science, since it offers new types of unique and valuable properties, obtained from ordinary substances. However, this potential has not been demonstrated physically. Recently several researchers in the field of Optimal Design, using techniques of Topology Optimization, have designed Artificial Materials that are predicted to have outstanding properties, such as zero thermal expansion or remarkably high piezoelectric properties. In this high-risk/high-payoff project, the PI will collaborate with these designers, and fabricate their structures from conventional ceramics, evaluate their properties, and compare experiment with theory. Optimally Designed materials are fine scale arrays of solid and void, which require unique fabrication methods that can form sub-millimeter features. A new technique developed by the PI, Microfabrication by Co-Extrusion, will be used to produce the Artificial Materials from two-dimensional designs with features in the 50-micron size range. Other fabrication techniques will be used as well: Indirect Ceramic Stereolithography to produce three-dimensional designs with features in the 300-micron size range, and Direct Ceramic Inkjet Deposition for designs in the 100-micron size range. Ceramic-air composites will be fabricated from Optimal Designs obtained from the PI's collaborators and then the piezoelectric and elastic properties will be determined and compared to theoretical predictions. Artificial Materials with zero thermal expansion will be also be fabricated, using ceramic-filled polymer composites, and their thermoelastic properties will be characterized.%%%The objective of the program is to explore the practical application of Optimal Design by Topology Optimization to engineering materials, extend Image-Based Design techniques to materials processing, and create unique piezoelectric and thermoelastic materials. The concept of Artificial Materials came from the computational design community. This type of material are not yet available because of the major challenge in fabrication. The PI proposes to fabricate them using state-of-the-art ceramics processing techniques from designs obtained from his collaborators to perform this multidisciplinary project. This effort will bring materials science closer to the goal of "materials by design."***