Kathy Lu, Ph.D.Kathy Lu, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, will lead a multidisciplinary team from other national top universities in a $7.5 million project, funded through the Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program.
Lu’s team, which includes co-principal investigators from five other universities, will explore “Compositionally Complex Ceramics for Hypersonics via Knowledge Guided Ceramization.”
The project is sponsored by the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
While UAB has partnered in previous MURI projects, Lu is the UAB School of Engineering’s first principal investigator on a MURI project.
“Our goal for this project is to understand, design, pyrolyze and optimize compositionally complex ceramics for hypersonics,” Lu said. “Our team encompasses world-leading experts in precursor synthesis, pyrolysis study, characterization, reactive force field — or ReaxFF — simulation, thermomechanical and thermochemical property assessment, and AI/machine learning.”
Lu’s team includes Timothy Long, Ph.D., Arizona State University; Adri van Duin, Ph.D., Penn State University in Pennsylvania; Wei Chen, Ph.D., Northwestern University in Illinois; Pulickel M. Ajayan, Ph.D., Rice University in Texas; and Scott J. McCormack, Ph.D., University of California at Davis. Other collaborators include the Air Force Research Lab, the Naval Research Lab, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and the Oak Ridge National Lab.
“MURI projects are prestigious, ambitious awards that allow scientists to take on incredibly complex tasks through cross-disciplinary collaboration among the nation’s top scientific minds and research facilities,” said Jeff Holmes, M.D., dean of the UAB School of Engineering. “Leading an effort like this is a milestone for UAB Engineering, and this type of national leadership is exactly why we were so excited to recruit Dr. Lu.”
Through this project, Lu says, her team will fill the scientific gap in polymer-to-ceramic conversion and will lead to quantitatively designed compositionally complex ceramics of 1,400-3,000 degrees Celsius.
For more about the MURI program, click here.