| Dr. Vijay Chalivendra of Mechanical Engineering Department has been awarded $134,838 for a period of three years (2009-12) by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a collaborative project with University of Rhode Island (PI: Dr. Arun Shukla, co-PI: Dr. Sze Yang). The total award of this NSF grant for both universities is $360,743. The goal of funded project is to develop smart polymeric materials that can report critical material deformation in the 10 to 500 nm range through an embedded electrically conductive network. Nano-structured building blocks will be synthesized to generate such network. The building block has a brush-like structure with electrically conducting polymers as the bristles, and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as the backbone of the brush. When the nano-brushes are blended into the host matrix, the conducting polymers will be entangled with the host polymers. The brush structure is designed to enhance the signal in response to nano deformations. The electrical signals obtained from the conductive network will be far richer in details than traditional plots of mechanical stress-strain behavior. The details will be used to verify or refute the mechanisms previously proposed to explain the mechanical stress-strain curves under various types of quasi-static and dynamic loading conditions. |