 |
 |
| PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS CURRENT STUDENTS ALUMNI & FRIENDS COMMUNITY FACULTY & STAFF | |
Missouri S&T grad Michel Barsoum thinks the ancient Egyptians can teach us some things about materials science. At MIT, Barsoum recently presented evidence that a revolutionary kind of cement was used to put the Great Pyramids together 4,500 years ago.
Dr. Tom O'Keefe, Curator's Professor emeritus of materials science and engineering at Missouri S&T, passed away April 13 in Rolla. O'Keefe earned his undergraduate and doctorate degrees in Rolla and worked at the university for 34 years. He reitred in 1999.
“Unofficially, dad never retired," says Dr. Matt O'Keefe, who has followed in his father's footsteps at Missouri S&T. "He was still doing research and a lot of it was with me.”
You can read about one of those research efforts here.
Also, there's a nice piece in today's RDN about Matt's dad.
Visitation will be from 5-8 p.m. Wednesday, April 16, at James and Gahr Mortuary in Rolla (with a prayer service beginning at 5 p.m.). The Mass of Christian Burial will be at 10 a.m. Thursday, April 17, at St. Patrick Church in Rolla.
Aerogels are typically made from pearl necklace-like strings of silica nanoparticles, and can be strengthened with a polymer coating, so that the strands form crosslinks wherever they meet. But inspired by the highly interlocked structures of bird nests, Leventis switched to vanadia-based structures, which form a more highly entangled worm-like nanostructure.'Both crosslinked silica and vanadia are very strong materials. But crosslinked vanadia aerogels never fail under compression, and can absorb at least four times the kinetic energy of the silicon carbide ceramics used for armour,' said Leventis. 'Killer applications will be in areas where we can take advantage of the multifunctional character of these materials - strength in combination with acoustic and thermal insulation - such as lightweight structural materials for buildings, and the automotive and airplane industries.'
This is not the first time Leventis has gained notice for his work with nanomaterials. Last June, the chemistry professor made Nanotech Briefs' Nano 50 list of top researchers in the field. Leventis made the list for his previous work with aerogels.
Here's something Missouri S&T's Greg Hilmas, who is working on materials that could protect hypersonic missiles from intense heat, told us a year or two ago:
“These hypersonic vehicles are just test vehicles right now or simply on the drawing board. It is expected that they will exit and re-enter the atmosphere as they are gliding toward their intended target.”
WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. officials say the Pentagon is planning to shoot down a broken spy satellite expected to hit the Earth in early March.The Associated Press has learned that the option preferred by the Bush administration will be to fire a missile from a U.S. Navy cruiser, and shoot down the satellite before it enters Earth's atmosphere.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the options will not be publicly discussed until a Pentagon briefing later Thursday.
Reports have it that Dr. Scott Miller in materials sciences and engineering has become obsessed with the campus's new toy, a focused ion beam scanning electron microscope capable of reproducing/etching detailed images that you could see with your own eyes if they were capable of magnifying things about a million times. Check this out (it's Miller's Missouri S&T logo near the eye of a needle):
You don't have to be Louis Armstrong to blow glass. It just takes a few puffs. (Just be careful, the crucible furnace in UMR's new Hot Glass Shop fires at 2,100 degrees.) The news release is up.
P.S. For updates on UMR design teams, be sure to visit our sister blog. These days, Experience This! is being written (mostly) by Bob Phelan, who is currently in Florida with the solar car (which is apparently big in Europe).
And you thought you had to go all the way to Silver Dollar City to see glass blowing...As Lee Corso would say, Not so fast, my friend! At a university known for blowing up store-bought chickens, there is now a new glass blowing studio. The Hot Glass Shop, which was funded by Delbert Day's Mo-Sci Corp., will be formally dedicated at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 7, in Fulton Hall on campus. The dedication ceremony will feature glass blowing demos. “We are using an artistic approach to teach materials science,” says Dr. Richard Brow, Curators’ Professor of ceramic engineering. UMR is internationally known for glass science and materials research. We'll post a link to the official news release on this as soon as it's available.
Making a balloon out of glass might not seem like such a great idea on the surface – but Hank Rawlins, a graduate student in metallurgical engineering at UMR, thinks glass balloons might turn out to be the best way to put monitoring equipment in the upper atmosphere. It's an idea worth considering, and, for now, it's an idea that's worth at least $5,000.
That's how UMR chemist Nicholas Leventis describes his invention: cross-linked aerogels. The extremely lightweight and sturdy composite material is four to five times stronger than material currently used in military armor. This week he was named to Nanotech Briefs list of Nano 50 for his work.
Aerogels are nothing new. They've been around since the 1930s, but they were highly brittle and of little practical use. By chemically bonding -- or cross-linking -- strings of tiny glass particles with polymers like polystyrene, polyurethane and epoxy, Leventis created aerogels that are 100 times more resistant to breakage and totally resistant to moisture.
Leventis sees possible uses in military armor, lightweight thermal insulation, fuel transport systems, tiny, but sturdy, drug-delivery vehicles and lighter, more efficient aircraft and spacecraft frames.
Want to see something cool? These videos show the difference between conventional armor-grade material and a cross-linked areogel when they're hit with an impact that is eight times that of a .45 mm bullet. It's pretty impressive.
First, the conventional material:
Now, here's the aerogel:
A reusable crash barrier developed by UMR Chancellor John F. Carney has made an impact on highway safety over the years. Now, the chancellor's invention is being cited as an example of university research that helps make the world a better place.
The chancellor's cylindrical crash cushions -- like the ones pictured here, at a St. Louis exit ramp -- are among the 100 university research projects described in The Better World Report, Part Two: Technology Transfer Works: 100 Innovations from Academic Research to Real-World Application.
The report is published by the Better World Project, an undertaking of the non-profit Association of University Technology Managers. Released in April, the report "shows how technology transfer -- the process of licensing and commercializing academic research -- improves people’s lives, contributes to the economy and supports tomorrow's discoveries,” says AUTM President John Fraser.
Carney's work also caught the notice of The Kansas City Star, which reported on the citation over the weekend.
UMR graduate student Steven Jung is conducting research with Dr. Delbert Day, who is internationally known for finding new applications for glass. Among other inventions, Day developed tiny radioactive glass beads that can be injected directly into cancerous areas of the body. Jung is working with glass materials to build medical scaffolding for use in the regeneration of bone tissue. He is also interested in using glass materials as a method to help contain nuclear waste. But what we really want to tell you about is this.
When a journalist from St. Louis TV station Fox2 KTVI wanted to know what was causing the stainless steel Gateway Arch to stain, one of the experts he talked to was Matt O'Keefe, a UMR metallurgy professor (and 1985 MetE grad). KTVI's Paul Schankman interviewed O'Keefe for the story, which aired Monday night (but can be viewed again, thanks to the Internet).
Superconductors aren't just fabulous with trains and symphonies -- they might also be used to solve a lot of the world's energy problems eventually. Dr. Fatih Dogan has been busy trying to cultivate superconducting materials in his UMR laboratory, but he also found time to co-author a paper published this week in Nature Physics.
Steel has long been the material of choice when it comes to needing strength. Imagine if Superman was the "Man of Aluminum" or the "Man of Wood" or something. It just wouldn't be right. At any rate, a group of UMR students has received a $47,500 grant to compare steel with other construction and manufacturing materials. Products to be compared in the study include structural steel versus wood in residential construction, steel cans versus plastic frozen food containers in the food container market, steel roofing versus standard asphalt shingles in residential construction and automotive-quality steel body panels versus aluminum. The students are especially interested in the environmental impact of the materials through their life cycles, from extraction through end use. No word on whether a comparison between steel and kryptonite is planned.
A lot of attention has been paid to the ceramic tiles that keep the space shuttle from burning up on reentry. But two UMR researchers say that won't be a problem for long. “We’re going back to Apollo-style lunar missions,” says Dr. Greg Hilmas. “The push is to go back to the moon and then on to Mars by 2020. They won’t need a reusable reentry vehicle like the shuttle in the decade ahead. NASA is looking to use capsules with a shield that erodes some as it is heated. For that, they can use carbon-based material instead of the dense ceramics we’re developing at UMR.”
The ceramics Hilmas and research partner Dr. Bill Fahrenholtz are trying to develop can withstand temperatures up to 3,000 degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to incinerate just about everything on Earth. By contrast, the ceramic tiles used on the space shuttle can only withstand temperatures of about 1,350 degrees Celsius.
So why do we need materials to protect against temperatures more than twice as high as those generated during shuttle reentry? Think missiles that can go more than five times the speed of sound.
Check out the 25 Hottest Articles in materials science. UMR's Rajiv Mishra is the lead author of the No. 11 hottest article, which is on friction stir welding.
While Nucor is in town to give UMR a cool $2 million (see post below), they decided to go ahead and pass around some extra pocket cash. After touring UMR's foundry, high school girls attending the Summer Solutions Camp were given a quiz to see what they had learned. Those with the six best scores on the quiz were surpised by a representative of Nucor, who handed each of them a hundred dollar bill. For these girls, who haven't even had a chance to enroll at UMR yet, an education in science and engineering is already paying off!
High school girls attending UMR's Summer Solutions Camp toured the foundry in McNutt Hall today. Meanwhile, representatives from Nucor were also on campus today -- Nucor has officially donated $2 million to create an endowment for a new steelmaking chair in UMR's materials science and engineering department.
The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded UMR's materials science and engineering department $100,000 for the continued development of glass-based seals for solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). "What we're doing is developing glasses that will hermetically seal the different components in a fuel cell," says the department chair, Dr. Richard Brow.
The UMR team is trying to engineer compatible materials that can operate over long periods of times at high temperatures. They start out with a form of glass that is converted to a ceramic material. The glass melts to form a seal and then crystallizes as a ceramic. Tests are conducted on campus to evaluate changes in material properties -- with heat treatments up to 800 degrees for several months.
According to Brow, the real engineering challenge is to find materials that maintain their integrity during repeated periods of heating and cooling. That's where the glass research comes in. "We're trying to develop sealing materials that expand and contract with temperature to the same degree as other SOFC materials," says Brow, who has been working on the problem for several years. "We're close to the point where the technology can be commercialized. Finding a way to hermetically seal an SOFC is very important. That's probably why we got funded. The DOE recognizes the importance of solving this problem."
Nucor Corp. has donated $2 million to endow a chair in the materials science and engineering department at UMR. The university will begin a search to fill the endowed chair soon. The selected individual, who should be in place by the start of the 2007-2008 academic year, will be involved in steelmaking research.