Bulk nanostructured materials offer tremendous opportunity for re-inventing materials, but also pose challenges both in terms of characterization, processing, design, scaling, and manufacturing.
This talk will present recent work developing nanoengineered hierarchical advanced (aerospace-grade) composites with enhanced mechanical properties, with a focus recently on physics that allows imparting multifunctionality, and resulting technologies.
Such hybrid nanoengineered advanced composites employ aligned nanofibers (in most of our work, aligned carbon nanotubes, A-CNTs) in several architectures to enhance bulk properties of existing aerospace-grade advanced composites.
Building multifunctionality concurrent with these mechanical property improvements includes thermal and electrical conductivity tailoring for ice protection, damage sensing, and self-manufacturing, among others.
For example, out-of-oven (OoO) manufacturing utilizes conductive heating from flexible nanostructured CNT films to conductively, rather than convectively, heat the composite, resulting in 2-3 orders of magnitude reduction in required energy, opening up new possibilities including (when combined with a new nanoporous membrane) autoclave-free composite manufacturing.
Fundamental studies on polymer-nanofiber interactions via variable-volume fraction (vol%) A-CNT polymer nanocomposites, including processing limits to ultra-high vol% systems, led to the development of a combined top-down and bottom-up fabrication methodology for nanocomposites that addresses the key issues (agglomeration, viscosity, scale, alignment) that have frustrated the use of nanomaterials as bulk composites.
Research in related areas including carbon nanostructure catalysis, nanomaterials in microelectronics and energy storage, 3D damage progression via x-ray tomography, and new work on aligned hexagonal boron nitride nanotubes (A-hBNNTs) including in-space radiation testing will be introduced as time allows.
Speaker:
Brian L. Wardle is the Apollo Program Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, with a joint appointment in Mechanical Engineering, where his work focuses on materials and structures. He received a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 1992 and completed S.M. and Ph.D. work at MIT in the Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1995 and 1998, respectively.
His research focuses on bulk nanostructured materials, particularly nanoengineered hierarchical advanced composites with enhanced mechanical properties, with recent extensions towards multiple types of multifunctionality.
Highlights from recent work include conception and fabrication of aligned carbon nanotubes (CNT) nanoengineered composite laminate architectures, development and realization of a nanostructured aerovehicle ice protection system, x-ray synchrotron radiation computed tomography (SRCT) investigations of damage development in nanoengineered composites, discovery of a new class of oxide catalysts for carbon nanotube (CNT) synthesis, creation of novel polymer and ceramic matrix nanocomposites, invention of out-of-oven manufacturing for advanced composite laminates, and nanomaterials for additive manufacturing (AM).
Free admission, open to all members of the university community and the public, subject to availability.
20.05.2026