The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Department of Materials Science and Engineering


LiMC² Plenary Talk

Field-Assisted Processing of Polymer-based Responsive Materials: A Path Towards Living Multifunctional Materials

Materials research has advanced significantly through groundbreaking work on bioinspired materials, smart, adaptive and responsive materials, self-healing materials, and redesign of living cells through synthetic biology. A new paradigm is envisaged to develop materials with living attributes, such as resilience, adaptability, sensing and self-powering, while enhancing their sustainability.

These living multifunctional materials leverage a synergy of materials and processing to achieve unprecedented control of material properties and functions. For example, a judicious distribution of the particles in polymers can result in complex and hierarchical micro-structures, where this structure complexity gives rise to multi-physics couplings and potential for unprecedented properties. In addition, the presence of the particles and the internal interfaces can further transform the performance of these materials by providing new mechanisms to engineer dielectric, electrical and electromechanical functionality, with important implications in energy harvesting and energy storage.

In this presentation, I will discuss use of particles as a strategy to push functional polymers to the next level, in particular how external fields transform starting constituents sets into their final microarchitectures, essentially dictating effective material properties. An expected outcome is that our approach will lead to multi-material composites with locally tailored architectures where mechanical, electrical, magnetic and coupled properties can be tuned during fabrication for specific applications.

Biography

Zoubeida Ounaies is a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Convergence Center for Living Multifunctional Material Systems (LiMC²) at the Pennsylvania State University. She is also the associate director of the Materials Research Institute. She joined Penn State in January 2011 as an associate professor with the Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professorship in Mechanical Engineering. Previously, she was an associate professor of Aerospace Engineering and Material Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on the design and development of responsive polymer-based materials with unique combinations of mechanical, electrical, magnetic, and coupled properties. Broadly speaking, she aims to develop new lightweight smart materials for applications as varied as advanced electronics, autonomous robotics, aerospace, automotive, medical and consumer industries. At Penn State, she established the Electroactive Materials Characterization Laboratory (EMCLab), where she and her students focus on advancing the application of smart materials in energy storage, energy conversion and energy harvesting. She is associate editor of the Smart Materials and Structures Journal, and a fellow of ASME and SPIE.