Goverment & Funding Agencies Talks

Aerospace Materials for Extreme Environments

The objective of Aerospace Materials for Extreme Environments program is to provide the fundamental knowledge required to enable revolutionary advances in future U.S. Air Force technologies through the discovery and characterization. Extreme environments are combination of heat-, stress-, magnetic-, electric-, microwave-, and acoustic fields. Materials of interest are ceramics, metals, hybrid systems including inorganic composites that exhibit superior structural, functional and/or multifunctional performance.

Transformative breakthroughs most of the time do not originate from the investigations of materials in the equilibrium state but in contrary at the margins of stability, in a regime at the limit or outside of the textbook knowledge within the discipline. In this context, this presentation will embrace materials and processing science approaches that are far from the thermodynamic equilibrium domain; i.e., directionally solidified eutectic structures, highly doped piezoelectric and thermoelectric materials, and other oxide materials with cage structures for electron emission.

The intent is to elucidate the complex interplay between phase transitions for electronic/magnetic phase separation and untangle the interdependence between structural and electronic effects.

I will also discuss what I consider to be promising research concentration areas specifically ceramics research, including the focused development of a ceramics processing science, the development of materials for use in the hypersonic regime, as well as the design of composite insulators containing thermal radiation inhibitors. In the history, science has been done through international collaborations. AFOSR has been forefront to fund research beyond the US shores. I intend articulate AFOSR’s international investment strategy and processes.