At the airport, he boards a 300-passenger supersonic jet that will take him to Japan for a business lunch and return him to L.A. that afternoon. From the airplane, he uses a post-silicon era telecommunications system to send and receive voice and e-mail messages with his clients on the ground. Meanwhile, Tom, a diabetic, painlessly applies a microneedle patch to his arm. The patch contains a computer microchip that controls a miniature pump to deliver insulin to Tom as he needs it.
Back in L.A. that afternoon, Tom heads to his mountain climbing class where he practices scaling a wall using a specially tailored rope designed to dissipate the energy of a climber's fall and prevent the rope from completely failing in an accident. Tom ends the day resting in his climate-controlled home powered by his utility company's highly efficient, low-emission gas turbines.
Without knowing it, perhaps, Tom has accomplished his day because of years of research in materials science and engineering. Of course, materials scientists and engineers may not have designed and manufactured his car, the jet he boarded or the gas turbine that generated power to cool his home. But those products would not be feasible — and indeed many of them will be realities by 2015 — without solid contributions from the "material world."
"Materials science and engineering is an enabling discipline at the interface of science and engineering," says Dr. Ashok Saxena, chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Materials Science and Engineering. "It is very critical to the performance of a lot of engineering systems."
"A lot" may be an understatement. Materials are everywhere, from your clothes to your house to your car to your workplace to your community. Do you like your computer, your cell phone and your stereo? Well, they wouldn't work without the semiconducting material properties of silicon. Could you do without your refrigerator or stove? Well, you would have to, without fabrication of plastic and metal parts. Do you need to fly across the country today? Well, you couldn't, were it not for materials scientists' discovery of nickel-based super alloys that led to development of jet engines.
Materials are so important, in fact, that entire eras — for example, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age — are named for them. Materials continue to drive technology advancement, though a necessary shift in research is occurring.
"It used to be that materials were found in nature — for example, wood, copper or aluminum," Saxena says. "We used to process these materials and measure their properties. Then we would try to find applications. The emphasis today is to first think of an application and then try to design the right material for that application. That right material may not be a pure metal or a pure ceramic. It might be a composite material that would have constituents of metals or ceramics in it.
photo by Gary Meek
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Research teams led by Drs. Sue Ann Bidstrup Allen, Cliff Henderson, left, and Paul Kohl are devising a processing technology that could make profound improvements in the fabrication of microfluidic, microelectronic and micro-electro-mechanical devices.
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"Part of the reason for this shift is that the use of these traditional materials has been optimized. In order to make the next leap forward in terms of performance, materials have been identified as a critical technology. Because these materials don't exist in nature, we have to design the materials for these new applications," Saxena explains.
Thus, the more than 100 Georgia Tech researchers who are working on materials science and engineering projects are developing both novel applications and the materials necessary to make them realities. There is ongoing work — much of it interdisciplinary — with microelectronic materials, structural materials, biomaterials, materials physics and chemistry, and materials processing, for example. It involves researchers from many schools in the College of Engineering and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Physics in the College of Sciences. Researchers interact regularly through collaborative projects and meetings of the Georgia Tech Materials Council.
"Materials science is one of the truly interdisciplinary fields, just by the very nature of it," says Dr. Jean-Lou Chameau, dean of the College of Engineering. "For example, in developing biomaterials, you often need a biology background, a chemistry background and an engineering background."
Georgia Tech materials researchers are working together to understand the fundamental structure of materials and then create new and improved materials with specific properties. Also, they are developing: new ways to characterize materials; mathematical models for predicting material behavior; and new processes for synthesizing and joining materials and methods for fabricating parts of engineering structures.
Some specific areas of research include electronic packaging, nanotechnology and molecular design, environmentally benign materials and processes, optoelectronics, high-temperature materials, composites and photovoltaics. (See the accompanying story links at the top of this page for various project descriptions.)
Saxena believes electronics packaging materials research — specifically, studies on encapsulate materials and the assembly of components — is an especially important area of investigation at Georgia Tech. "For example, if you make an electronics package very small, you dissipate a lot of power," Saxena explains. "That power gets dissipated in the form of heat. You have to find ways to get the heat out. The thermal conductivity of the material then becomes extremely important. Then there are a lot of signals going back and forth, and the dielectric properties of these materials become very important. And the speed of the signal is also important, and it has to do with material properties, as well."
Georgia Tech's Packaging Research Center, under the leadership of Drs. Rao Tummala and C.P. Wong, is developing new materials and process technologies that will lead to smaller electronic packages with several-fold improvements in performance at a fraction of today's cost. The National Science Foundation is funding the center's research.
photo by Joann Vitelli
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Georgia Tech civil engineering Professor Dr. Abdul-Hamid Zureick, left, explains to a student the use of fiber-reinforced polymeric material to strengthen bridges. Zureick's studies show this material can make bridges 30 to 40 percent stronger than their original design. He is gathering long-term data to estimate the benefits of the material over a bridge's lifespan.
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In the nanoscale realm, Georgia Tech research on carbon nanotubes is yielding applications in microelectronics and other fields in which extremely small conductors and other structures would allow production of new types of nanoscale devices. For example, Drs. Walt de Heer and Z.L. Wang's discovery of new electronic and micromechanical properties of nanotubes led them to suggest a "nanobalance" small enough to weigh viruses and other sub-micron-scale particles.
Chameau cites environmentally benign materials as another hot area of study at Georgia Tech. "We are trying to make products and processes that use less energy, fewer materials and last longer," he says. "To do that requires materials with higher performance, like 'smart' materials. There will be lots of activities in this area in the next few years at Georgia Tech."
Other areas where Georgia Tech is making significant contributions include: carbon fiber-reinforced polymeric materials for bridge reinforcement and repair; a biomaterial called Salubria for replacement of arteries and cartilage in thumb and knee joints; and microcoatings that protect surfaces from heat, which are needed in industries ranging from aerospace to cookware.
Numerous Georgia Tech patents, technology licenses and high-tech, start-up companies are evidence of the significance of materials research at Georgia Tech. One example is a pair of patents for testing elastically tailored composite structures that both extend and twist in response to force. These structures could improve the performance of helicopters, sports cars and sporting goods.
Materials scientists and engineers at Georgia Tech, and elsewhere, are driven to create and refine technologies that can improve our lives in this century and beyond, Saxena says. Though military and NASA applications initially drive much of the research, the technologies are being transferred to numerous industries that affect consumers. Among those products are improved automobiles, microelectronics, aircraft, wireless telecommunications systems and flat panel displays.
"Materials science is critical to new technology," Chameau says. "Everything we do needs to be more efficient, to last longer, to be more effective, to be less expensive, to dissipate energy better. All the products we are making need to have higher capabilities. And all of this relates to the material's properties.... Materials will become more and more critical as we have these requirements for better performance."
For more information, you may contact Dr. Ashok Saxena, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0245. (Telephone: 404-894-2888) (E-mail:
ashok.saxena@mse.gatech.edu).
Also see the Georgia Tech Materials Council Web site at www.matecouncil.gatech.edu for links to campus-wide materials programs or the School of Materials Science and Engineering Web site at
www.mse.gatech.edu/.
