Collaborative Research: Nanofluidics Enabled Attenuation of Dynamic Impacts and Stress Waves

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Dynamic impacts can cause stress waves within solid materials, resulting in damage to infrastructure, personnel, or devices. However, current approaches to mitigate stress waves are inadequate in that they rely on energy absorption associated with unrecoverable buckling and/or plastic deformation of materials and structures. Moreover, the time required to deform these materials is typically much longer than the time needed for dynamic impacts and stress waves to propagate through these protection materials. Nanofluidics, in which the liquid is forced into nanoscale channels by an external pressure or stress, is expected to attenuate stress waves and offers a entirely new paradigm for the design of protection materials and structures. The overarching goal of this project is to investigate and understand nanofluidics-enabled mitigation of dynamic impacts and stress waves with particular focus on nanofluidics in three-dimensional nanoporous networks. This collaborative project will also provide a broad impact on education including professional trainings to both graduate and undergraduate students, and on outreach including inspiring interactions with local high schools.The objective of this collaborative project is to systematically investigate the science of nanofluidics in non-wetting liquid-solid nanoporous composite materials, and to explore its underlying protection mechanism for mitigating dynamic impacts and stress waves. To this end, the proposed research will focus on three tasks: (i) to investigate and unveil the science of nanofluidics in non-wetting liquid-solid nanoporous structures under a high speed loading using atomistic simulations, (ii) to develop a theoretical model of nanofluidic energy capture mechanism to quantify nanofluidic responses to dynamic impacts and stress waves, and (iii) to design and carry out verification experiments at high strain rates by employing non-wetting liquid-solid nanoporous materials platforms. The nanofluidic energy capture mechanism will refresh existing design strategies of protection materials and structures subjected to stress waves, thereby revolutionizing both fundamental nanofluidics and application technologies.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.