Developing blueprints for designer materials that can change their shape at will is the goal of a $4.3 million, five-year grant a professor has received as a National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship.
Sharon Glotzer is a professor of chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, macromolecular science and engineering, physics, and applied physics. This fellowship will allow her to use modeling and simulation to discover how to create these shape-shifting materials from nanoparticles.
Today researchers can fabricate nanoparticles in a vast array of shapes and out of a multitude of different substances. They can make particles assemble into different arrangements, which ultimately controls the material’s properties.
Through this grant Glotzer aims to nurture a burgeoning branch of nanotechnology. The particles she envisions would be substantially more complex than today’s nanoparticles.
“We’ll be designing new particles that don’t yet exist, for materials that don’t yet exist,” Glotzer says. “They will be new building blocks with intrinsic functionality. In the far future, the basic science framework we develop in this project will provide the blueprints for materials that today can only be imagined.”
Potential applications are vast, Glotzer says. In the national security realm, such materials could be used for protective uniforms and gear, chemical detection, and stealth, for example. An aircraft conceivably could be painted with a material that changes its appearance as a chameleon does, Glotzer says. A bulk solid could be made to soften on cue and then morph between multiple shapes, each with a different purpose.
Advances in petascale computing could help bring about these next-generation materials. Petascale systems in development promise to be between 100-1,000 times faster than the “terascale” systems on many of today’s college campuses. U-M is a founding member of the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, which is a partner in “Blue Waters,” the world’s first sustained petascale computer system dedicated to open scientific research. It is expected to be online in 2011. Glotzer is the director of the consortium’s new Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering.
