CAREER: Rational Design and Manufacturing of Nanostructured Surfaces and Interfaces in Lightweight Materials

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This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award supports fundamental research on scalable manufacturing of lightweight structural materials including polymer-matrix composites and lightweight magnesium alloys. The grant looks to develop new surface modification techniques, relying on atomic layer deposition (ALD) which can deposit sub-monolayer thick layers which serve as seeds to subsequently grow new structures three-dimensional structures at the nanoscale. These designed nanostructures are remarkably versatile. They can serve to improve the strength of polymer composites allowing for light-weight materials as well as impede corrosion on metal surfaces. This addresses critical needs, for example, in the transportation sector to improve fuel efficiency and vehicle performance, while maintaining safety. Beyond the direct impact on lightweighting, the scientific knowledge generated will provide an alternative design paradigm to the bottom-up design and manufacturing at the nanoscale. The educational goal is to promote public awareness of the importance of nanomaterials for the future of domestic manufacturing. The educational plan integrates concepts of design and manufacturing, nanotechnology, and surface science across multiple levels, including a new 6th grade materials curriculum, integrating materials education into undergraduate student team mentorship, and promoting a more diverse STEM workforce through research demonstrations to encourage underrepresented students to apply to graduate school and participate in research.Current manufacturing processes for controlling surface and interfacial structure in bulk structural materials suffer from poor control of geometric parameters such as feature size, shape, geometric orientation, which is particularly challenging within hierarchical assemblies of nanomaterials on non-planar surfaces. This lack of deterministic control of structure limits our ability to fundamentally understand how the nanostructuring produces specific material properties and a route to rationally design optimized structures to achieve application-specific properties. This project's effort addresses this limitation by quantitatively identifying the process-structure relationships needed to achieve deterministic control of interfacial geometry and composition at the nanoscale. The approach uses the concept of spatial ALD to generate sub-monolayer seeding areas for the growth of nanostructures through solution-based processes. The process can be repeated to develop three dimensional nanostructures on surfaces to precisely tune the interfacial geometry, composition, and microstructure of lightweight structural materials, and quantify the impact on their mechanical properties and corrosion resistance. An improved understanding of these process-structure relationships will provide the fundamental knowledge needed to ?encode? the manufacturing instructions for the controlled hierarchical assembly of nanoscale building blocks into surface architectures. This approach will be used to address two critical challenges in lightweight structural materials: 1) rational design of nanostructured interphases in polymer matrix composites to tune their mechanical properties, and 2) improving corrosion-resistance of magnesium alloys.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.