Congratulations to HEMI alumnus and Army Research Laboratory (ARL) collaborator Dr. Cyril Williams, who recently was elected as a 2016 Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He has been a member of ASME for eleven years and his main areas of study encompass shock compression science, spall fracture, and dynamic failure processes.

Dr. Williams is an established collaborator in the Metals Group of HEMI’s Center for Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environments (CMEDE). He began his work as a graduate student in HEMI and later joined the ARL’s Shock Physics Laboratory.  There, he was recognized with the 2015 Federal Engineer of the Year Award. He currently serves as the executive head of Government Relations at ASME.

Congratulations to Dr. Kelvin Xie, an Assistant Research Scientist working with Professor Kevin Hemker, on winning the 2016 TMS First Place Prize in the Best Poster Competition for Characterization of Minerals, Metals and Materials. In collaboration with Prof. Vlad Domnich and Prof. Rich Haber at Rutgers and Dr. Jim McCauley at ARL, their work, titled “Microstructural Characterization of Boron-rich Boron Carbide by Transmission Electron Microscopy”, unraveled that the formation of nano-scale planar defects and the attained mechanical properties of boron carbide can be controlled by carefully tuning the chemical stoichiometry. Boron carbide is an attractive body armor material and understanding the roles of stoichiometry provides an additional means to design even lighter and tougher body armor.

The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) is an international professional organization for materials scientists and engineers that encompasses the entire range of materials and engineering. It was founded in 1945 and is one of the largest materials science societies with over 12000 members and 4000 attendees for the annual meeting. For the symposium, 92 posters were reviewed and the best poster award is judged on the technical merit, originality, potential impact on the field and clarity of presentation.

Congratulations to HEMI graduate student and CMEDE researcher Thomas O’Connor for winning the Ken Hass Outstanding Student Paper Award from The American Physical Society’s (APS) Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics (FIAP)!

Thomas was recognized at the March FIAP meeting for his work titled, “Chain Ends and the Ultimate Tensile Strength of Polyethylene Fibers”.

The paper answers the question, “What is the strongest polyethylene fiber you can make?” Thomas and other researchers used very large molecular dynamics simulations to study how crystalline polyethylene fails when it is subjected to heavy loads. Their simulations agree well with experiments, and they discover that the polyethylene crystal fails because chains slip out of place at their chain ends. In science jargon: 1 dimensional (1D) dislocations nucleate at the chain ends and cause chain slip. They found that they can understand these 1D dislocations by using a simple analytic model. The simple model works very well, which is exciting, because it means they can quickly and easily use this simple theory to study polyethylene and other polymers without having to run such expensive simulations.

 The Ken Hass Outstanding Student Paper Award pays homage to the many contributionshe made in the industrial applications of physics (especially automotive applications of theoretical solid-state physics) and of his service to the American Physical Society. As Director of the Physics Department at Ford Research, Ken Hass was strongly committed to promoting science education at the pre-college and college level. The award was endowed in 2011 by FIAP.

More of Thomas’s work within the polymers field can be found on page 54 of the 2015 issue of the CMEDE Highlights.

Thomas O’Connor (right) receives the Ken Hass Outstanding Student Paper Award at the FIAP March meeting.

On September 10, 2015, Dr. Lori Graham-Brady, Associate Director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, along with Dr. Alvin Kennedy, Interim Dean of the School of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences (SCMNS) at Morgan State University, and Dr. John Beatty, Senior Materials Researcher at the Army Research Laboratory, hosted a ceremony to recognize Morgan State University students Oreoluwa Adesina, Hashmath Fathima and Dennis Aryee as Extreme Science Scholars (ESS).

Oreoluwa is a sophomore Electrical Engineering major who hopes to gain a better understanding of how extreme material science and electrical engineering combine to obtain groundbreaking discoveries.

Hashmath is in her first year as a Master’s of Engineering student. She hopes to learn more about working with composites and create a network of researchers who can help build and develop new programs for equipment used in MSU’s laboratories.

Dennis also is a first year graduate student, majoring in Physics. He’s hoping that this opportunity will help him develop a better understanding of materials science and how certain applications can benefit mankind.

The ESS program supports Morgan State University students with funding provided by the Army Research Laboratory based on special interest by the Maryland Congressional delegation. Morgan State University ESS program students are at the graduate and/or undergraduate level and pursuing a math, science, engineering or technology degree. The recipients for this year’s ESS program will receive tuition support for this academic year. This program represents an investment in the future generation of scientists and engineers within the state of Maryland who will hopefully go onto careers in the government, academia and industry.

The ESS program is an expansion of the current Extreme Science Internship (ESI) program. The ESI program provides internal and external internships for selected Morgan State University students. They spend 8-15 weeks performing research activities at one of 15 institutions affiliated with the Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environments Collaborative Research Alliance (MEDE CRA) within ARL’s Enterprise for Multiscale Research of Materials. Both the ESI and ESS programs support the diversity pledge made earlier this year by Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering Dean Ed Schlesinger.

2015 Extreme Science Scholars are presented certificates from program sponsors. From left front: Dennis Ayree, Hashmath Fathima, Oreoluwa Adesina, Dr. John Beatty (ARL). From left back: Dr. Lori Graham-Brady (HEMI, JHU) and Dr. Alvin Kennedy (SCMNS, Morgan State).

Size-affected dislocation-mediated plasticity is important in a wide range of materials and technologies. The question of how to explain and predict the effect of size on the properties and response of materials has been at the forefront of mechanics and materials research. In a recent article in Nature Communications, CMEDE Principal Investigator Jaafar A. El-Awady addresses this by developing an experimentally validated generalized size-dependent dislocation-based model from discrete dislocation dynamics simulations. The model is shown to predict the single and polycrystalline strength as a function of crystal/grain size and the dislocation density. In the article titled “Unravelling the physics of size-dependent dislocation-mediated plasticity”, Prof. El-Awady also developed a new deformation mechanism map for single crystals based on these simulations.

This work presents a micro-mechanistic framework to predict and interpret strength size-scale effects, and provides an avenue towards performing multiscale simulations without ad hoc assumptions. Because of the applicability of the model to an extremely large set of crystal/grain sizes (that is, bulk to tens of nanometers) and its portability for predicting the strength of both single and polycrystals, the proposed model is expected to have further applications in constitutive law development and multiscale methods. This model can also be extended to address problems where the high strain rate sensitivity of mobile dislocation density is important.

Jaafar El-Awady, CMEDE Principal Investigator and Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, has been selected by the National Science Foundation to receive its prestigious CAREER Award.

The CAREER Award, which recognizes the highest level of excellence in early-stage researchers, is one of the NSF’s most competitive awards and emphasizes high-quality research and novel education initiatives. It provides funding so that young investigators have the opportunity to focus more intently on furthering their research careers.

The five-year grant will support El-Awady’s research, “Identifying the Micro-mechanisms Leading to Hydrogen-Induced Intergranular Fracture in Metals”. The aim of this research is to develop microstructurally based computational methods to fundamentally identify the effect of hydrogen on the deformation and fracture of metals used in energy generation, conversion or storage systems. This research will also contribute to engineering practice via advances in the structural integrity of energy systems. The education and outreach tasks through this grant will contribute to efforts aiming to improve STEM achievement in Baltimore elementary public schools with a high minority student population.

As founder of the Computational and Experimental Materials Engineering Laboratory at the Whiting School, El-Awady’s goal is to enhance the field of “materials by design” by moving from empirical, trial-and-error development techniques to a combination of state-of-the-art multi-scale computational methods and experimental techniques that streamline the process of developing reliable materials with superior performance.

El-Awady completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Cairo University in Egypt, then earned his doctoral degree also in Aerospace Engineering from the University of California, Los Angles (UCLA). Prior to joining Johns Hopkins University in 2010, Dr. El-Awady spent two years as a visiting scientist at the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Johns Hopkins University Department of Mechanical Engineering Associate Professor and CMEDE Principal Investigator Vicky Nguyen has been selected for the 2015 Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award by the ASME Applied Mechanics Division (AMD)!  This is the highest and most selective honor of the AMD for young researchers, in recognition Vicky’s outstanding contributions in applied mechanics.

With this award Vicky’s follows in the footsteps of Mary Boyce, the inaugural recipient of this award in 1988, and who is one of the most prolific senior researchers in applied mechanics, formerly the Ford Professor of Engineering and Department head of ME at MIT, and presently Dean of Engineering and Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Congratulations to Jaafar El-Awady, HEMI faculty member and assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, who been selected by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Materials Division to receive the 2014 Orr Early Career Award. El-Awady will receive the award in a formal presentation at ASME’s Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition in mid-November in Montreal.

This award was established in 2004 in recognition of early career research excellence in the general area of Failure of Materials, with particular emphasis on experimental, computational, and/or theoretical aspects of fatigue, fracture, or creep. Formal presentation of the award will take place at the Materials Division Award Ceremony/Reception during the ASME Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition, November 14-20 in Montreal, Canada. During the ceremony, Prof. El-Awady will deliver an award lecture.

El-Awady’s research interests include multiscale materials modeling, damage and fracture mechanisms of materials in mechanical design, material degradation in extreme environments, nano-materials and structures, impact dynamics and wave propagation (See: http://web1.johnshopkins.edu/comp_mat). El-Awady joined the Whiting School of Engineering in 2010. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aeronautical and astronautical engineering at Cairo University and his doctorate in aerospace engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles.