HEMI Seminar: Dr. Tian Xie

Please join us for a seminar with Dr. Tian Xie, a senior researcher and project lead at Microsoft Research AI4Science. The seminar is titled “MatterGen: a generative model for inorganic materials design.”

The seminar will begin at 2:30 PM on Friday, Feb. 23 in Gillman Hall 50.

This seminar will also be accessible virtually. Connection information will be distributed the morning of the seminar via email. Those interested in attending who are not on HEMI’s email list can reach out to Sarah Preis at [email protected] for connection information.

Bio: Tian Xie is a senior researcher and project lead at Microsoft Research AI4Science. He leads a team of researchers, engineers, and program manager to develop the next generation machine learning models for materials discovery. Before joining Microsoft, he was a postdoc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT from 2020 to 2022, co-advised by Tommi Jaakkola and Regina Barzilay. He got his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at MIT in 2020, advised by Jeffrey C. Grossman. Tian is most known for his research in graph representation learning and generative models for materials, including widely used models like CGCNN and CDVAE.

MSEE URA Kickoff Meeting – Day 1

Focus on celebrating the establishment of the MSEE URA, as well as top-level overviews.

The Materials Science in Extreme Environments University Research Alliance (MSEE URA) is an alliance of 18 research institutions led by Johns Hopkins University working in close collaboration with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).  The research is focused on understanding, predicting, and controlling the behavior of materials in extreme conditions caused by weapons of mass destruction.  The URA is expected to advance the types of materials that are capable of eliminating stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons while understanding and limiting the damage associated with nuclear blasts.

 

HEMI Seminar: Shu Yang

Foldable and Responsive Soft Metamaterials

Shu Yang
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Pennsylvania

Materials that can expand and collapse, fold, and transform into a variety shapes have attracted significant interest and have obvious applications in flexible electronics, color displays, smart windows, actuators, sensors, and both photonic and phononic devices. But how can we render a rigid device super-flexible so that it can wrap around a sphere without bending and stretching? How can flat surfaces be transformed into any desired 3D structure without disruptive stretching and deformation?
In my talk, I will show several examples how we introduce holes and cuts in periodically structured materials, so called metamaterials, exhibiting dramatic shape change (e.g. ~800% areal expansion) and super-conformability via expanding or collapsing of the periodic hole arrays without deforming individual lattice units. When choosing the cuts and geometry correctly, we show folding into the third dimension, known as kirigami. The kirigami structures can be rendered pluripotent, that is changing into different 3D structures from the same 2D sheet. We then pre-program the buckling direction and curvatures by introducing notches on existing kirigami structures or by embedding cues in surface patterns of liquid crystal elastomers with internal strains. Lastly, I will show our initial success in additive manufacturing toward textile based self-folding devices.

Seminar will be held at 3:30 PM in Malone Hall G 33/35.

 

 

HEMI Seminar: Nasr M. Ghoniem

Development of Micro-Architected Materials for Space Propulsion and Pulsed Power Applications

Nasr M. Ghoniem, University of California, Los Angeles

Advances in electrode, chamber, and structural materials will enable breakthroughs in future generations of electric propulsion and pulsed power (EP & PP) technologies. Although wide ranges of electric propulsion and pulsed power technologies have witnessed rapid advances during the past few decades, much of the progress was based on empirical development of materials through experimentation and trial-and-error approaches. To enable future technologies and to furnish the foundations for quantum leaps in performance metrics of these systems, a science-based materials development effort is required. We aim to develop new plasma-resilient material architectures that will enable future generations of electric propulsion and pulsed power technologies through an integrated research approach that combines multiscale modeling of plasma-material interactions, experimental validation, and material characterization. The range of materials of interest in EP & PP include refractory metals, such as tungsten and its alloys (W-Re) and molybdenum, ceramic composites, such as BN and Al2O3, high-strength copper alloys, and carbon-carbon composites. These classes of materials serve various design functions; primarily in cathode and anode applications, in accelerator grids, and in beam dumps of HPM sources. The presentation will give a review of our fundamental understanding for the limits of using these materials in EE & PP, and the opportunity to design material architectures that may dramatically improve their performance. We discuss the results of recent research related to three questions: (1) How can we control the thermomechanical response of materials in extreme heat flux and mitigate failure? (2) What are the phenomena that determine the unstable erosion of material surfaces in plasma and ion environments? and (3) How can we design materials that beneficially influence the plasma through Secondary Electron Emission (SEE)? We first review the status of our experimental facilities for simulation of the space environment. Then, we present results of our understanding of the thermomechanics of materials in severe pulsed plasma environments, and the factors that control the erosive instabilities of surfaces. Finally, results of the effects of surface architectures on secondary electron emission will be given.

Seminar will be held at 11:00 AM in Malone Hall, G33/35.

 

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