Multifunctional Materials Integration: Cooler Chips Mean Smaller Devices

Assistant Professor Mona Zebarjadi, collaborating with Assistant Professor Stephen McDonnell, is developing an active electronic cooling device using two-dimensional (2-D) materials that could remove this roadblock. “The cooling we think we can get from these devices beats the best coolers on the market,” Zebarjadi said. “We are very excited about the possibilities.”

~From SEAS News:  

Zebarjadi has a joint appointment in the Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, while McDonnell is a faculty member in the Department of Material Science and Engineering. Both are participants in UVA Engineering’s Multifunctional Materials Integration initiative, a $10 million interdisciplinary effort to develop new, advanced and complex materials and devices that – from their atoms all the way to their finished products, and systems of products – have a built-in level of energy efficiency and functionality that does not exist today.

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Dong and Wadley earn IJMR Best Paper of Year

UVA research scientist Liang Dong and University Professor Haydn Wadley have been awarded the 2017 Werner Koester Award for best paper. Each year the International Journal of Materials Research (IJMR) honours the "best paper" that appeared in the volume of IJMR of the preceding year.

The winning paper was entitled “Strong cellular lattices with nitro-carburized stainless steel hollow trusses.” Wadley's fellow co-authors and collaborators were Liang Dong (lead author, UVA), Arthur Heuer, Zhen Li, and Harold Kahn (Case Western Reserve University) and Vikram Deshpande of the Cambridge University. The award will be presented in Dresden, September 2017 at the German Society of Materials Science (DGM).

Liang Dong joined the Wadley from Wisconsin-Madison following a post-doctoral position with Roderic Lakes, with whom he did his PhD. Dong has been with the Wadley group since July of 2012 and his work focuses on the design, fabrication and characterization of cellular materials.


The Wadley group has a long history of leading in the development of topologically optimized cellular materials made from high performance materials such as carbon, silicon carbide and aluminum oxide fibers using state of the art polymers and light metallic alloys to interconnect them. Abundantly found in nature (bone, tree trunks, exoskeletons), cellular 2015 Robert W. Cahn Prize for the best paper of that year in the Journal of Materials Science.
materials have very high strength to weight ratios and offer many opportunities to make lighter structures for automobiles, planes, ships and space vehicles. In 2016, Haydn Wadley, along with coauthors Brad Richards, and Hengbei Zhao, were also award the


The current research on nitro-carburised stainless steel hollow trusses sought to use the very high strength (nitrogen and carbon hardened) surfaces of the tubes to resist buckling and resulted in significantly improved strength over their annealed lattice counterparts. Improvements in pitting corrosion and fatigue loading resistance were also expected by use of this process. Their recent findings suggests that nitro-carburized 304 stainless steel collinear lattices will be promising candidates for lightweight sandwich cores intended for elevated temperature and multifunctional applications.

Image: IJMR, Figure 2.

Congratulations 2017 Grads of MSE, EP, and Engineering Science!

Final Exercises is a special time at UVA. We celebrate those who achieved today the culmination of years of hard work.  Congratulations to the Class of 2017.

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George Cahen's lasting impact

From SEAS E-News: Engineers learn by doing. That is the reason Professor George Cahen often gives for championing experiential learning at UVA Engineering—and it is a lesson Cahen, now retiring after 40 years at UVA, himself learned as a boy growing up in Baltimore. 

 “The value I place on experiential learning goes back to my time with my dad. He gave me a real sense of the power of engineering. I wanted to pass that on to our students.”

Together with his father, an aerospace engineer for the Glenn L. Martin Company (now Lockheed Martin), Cahen tackled a number of projects that gave him his first inkling of the satisfaction to be had from bridging the gap between idea and realization. Together, they installed central air conditioning, a rarity at the time, flew model airplanes and built go-carts and motorized bicycles. When he was 12, Cahen and his dad built a cart and wagon that he used to tow his friends around their neighborhood.

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Robert Kelly named 2016 recipient of the H. H. Uhlig Award from ECS

Materials Science and Engineering Professor Robert Kelly has been named the 2016 recipient of the H. H. Uhlig Award from the Electrochemical Society’s Corrosion Division, another indicator of the exceptional quality of the corrosion research at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science.

BY SEAS NEWS

 “We have a 30-year history of excellence in corrosion research,” said Scully, who is co-director with Kelly of the Center for Electrochemical Science and Engineering. “Rob exemplifies all the qualities that have helped build and sustain this achievement.” 

The award, recognizing excellence in corrosion research and outstanding contributions to the field, was established in 1973 and, in 1985, named for Prof. H. H. Uhlig, the founder of the field in the United States and a president of the society. Since that time, UVA Engineering has won the Uhlig Award twice, the first time in 2009 when the society presented the award to Professor John R. Scully, interim chair of the Materials Science and Engineering Department.

Although corrosion lacks the visibility of such high-profile fields as computer science or medical research, it is a major challenge for the 21st century. A recent report from NACE International, a worldwide corrosion authority, cited the cost of corrosion to the U.S. economy at approximately $451 billion a year, a figure that has grown significantly as our infrastructure ages and as we require alloys for highly demanding environments.
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