Speaker: Ian McCue, Johns Hopkins University

Speaker: Dr. Ian McCue

Affiliation: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Labratory

ABSTRACT:

Decades of research have been devoted to developing nanostructured materials for applications ranging from heterogeneous catalysts to high-strength structures. However, fabrication techniques for these materials are frequently resource-intensive, and cannot be translated into commercial-scale processing. I will describe a scalable route to creating nanostructured materials and controlling their microstructure using liquid metal dealloying (LMD): a self-organization process that relies on selective dissolution to drive the emergence of a complex architecture with a controllable morphology and feature size. Unlike conventional aqueous dealloying, LMD may be used to synthesize bulk quantities of fully-dense nanocomposite materials. I will identify the key kinetic parameters controlling pattern formation in LMD and discuss how they may be tuned to fabricate materials with a variety of morphologies – globular, lamellar, and bicontinuous – and a large breadth of microstructural length scales – 30 nm to 10 µm. I will then give an overview of the promising thermo-mechanical properties of these new materials, including high thermal stability, high strength, and the potential to work harden. These results highlight opportunities for designing and synthesizing bulk nanocomposite metals with superior properties by tuning their microstructure morphology.

Biography:

Ian McCue is a postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL). He received his PhD degree in materials science and engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2015. He received a Materials Research Society Silver Graduate Student Award in 2014 for his dissertation work. He then held a postdoctoral appointment at Texas A&M University studying the fabrication and mechanical testing of metal nanocomposites. His current research at JHU/APL focuses on developing and studying new high temperature alloys for space and extreme aerothermal environments.