CAREER: Manufacturing of Mechanically Stable Nanoporous Ceramic Structures Via Selective Infiltration of Polymer Templates

该学院早期职业发展（Career）基金支持基础研究，以阐明制造具有可控结构和组成以及可编程机械稳定性的纳米多孔陶瓷结构的新策略。纳米多孔陶瓷材料在传感设备、水净化和过滤系统、催化材料等一系列新兴技术中发挥着举足轻重的作用，对国家的繁荣和福祉至关重要。尽管以前在无机材料的纳米尺度图像化方面做了很多努力，但对可用表面和界面的有限可及性仍然是定义材料系统功能的核心问题。预测和控制材料特定位置微观结构的能力，并将这些知识与它们的特性相关联，极大地扩展了目前低温陶瓷加工的制造能力，具有高可定制性、精度和准确性，这对于它们在工程研究和工业应用中的潜在用途至关重要。这项研究还为材料合成、力学和表面科学领域的本科生和研究生提供了新的教育机会，重点是为下一代制造业劳动力招募和留住女性和少数族裔。计划的外展活动提高了公众对先进制造能力和材料设计概念的认识和准备。本研究的具体目标是发现陶瓷涂层和异质结构中的加工-结构-性能关系，通过提供基于液相膨胀的无机前体自旋涂层聚合物模板渗透机制的基本见解，并定义控制所得结构的规则，从而进入各种材料的表面和界面。利用石英晶体微天平和掠射小角x射线散射技术，对两亲性嵌段共聚物模板的溶胀演化和渗透过程进行了原位监测，研究了有机/无机表面和界面的形成机制，揭示了陶瓷材料重建的指导原则。由此揭示的结构知识与涂层或薄膜的机械行为有关，有助于评估孔隙度对这些材料稳定性的影响，并量化这些结构在不同环境和应力下的损伤容忍度。项目目标的完成允许创建一个强大的可扩展的制造方法，适用于纳米多孔陶瓷和其他材料的大基因组。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant supports fundamental research to elucidate a new strategy of manufacturing nanoporous ceramic structures with controllable structure and composition and programmable mechanical stability. Nanoporous ceramic materials play a pivotal role in a broad range of emerging technologies, including sensing devices, water purification and filtration systems, and catalytic materials, which are important to national prosperity and welfare. Despite previous efforts on nanoscale patterning of inorganic materials, the limited accessibility to the available surfaces and interfaces remains a central problem in defining the functionality of the material systems. The ability to predict and control location-specific microstructures of materials and correlate this knowledge to their properties greatly extends current manufacturing capabilities for low-temperature processing of ceramics with high customizability, precision, and accuracy that are critically important for their potential use in engineering research and industrial applications. This research is complemented by offering new educational opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in the areas of materials synthesis, mechanics, and surface science, with an emphasis on recruiting and retaining women and under-represented minorities for the next-generation manufacturing workforce. The projected outreach activities increase public awareness and readiness for advanced manufacturing capabilities and materials design concepts. The specific goal of this research is to discover processing-structure-property relationships in ceramic coatings and heterostructures by providing fundamental insights on the mechanism of liquid phase swelling-based infiltration of spin-coated polymer templates with inorganic precursors and defining the rules that control the resulting structure and, thus, access to various materials’ surfaces and interfaces. By in-situ monitoring of the swelling-induced evolution and infiltration of amphiphilic block copolymer templates using a quartz crystal microbalance and grazing-incidence small-angle x-ray scattering techniques, the study investigates the formation mechanisms of organic/inorganic surfaces and interfaces and unravels the guiding principles of ceramic material reconstruction. The structure knowledge that is thus revealed is correlated with the mechanical behavior of the coatings or films towards evaluating the influence of porosity on the stability of these materials and to quantify the damage tolerance of these structures under exposure to different environments and stresses. The accomplishment of the project objectives allows for creating a robust scalable manufacturing approach applicable to the large genome of nanoporous ceramics and other materials.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.