Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2018-2019)

Materials science and engineering have a long history of developing theories and approaches to improve materials for enhanced resistance to failure. Microstructure engineering plays a crucial role in material design and development. However, quite often microstructural features may not provide clear clues for tailoring materials. With increasing demands for applications under not only usual conditions but also extreme ones, material design has been required to rely on more fundamental principles.
This project is proposed to develop new methodologies for structural material design and modification with emphasis on tribo-materials on a feasible electronic base. Intrinsic properties of materials are fundamentally determined by their electron behavior, which governs the atomic bond strength and flexibility or polarizability. Great effort has long been made to correlate mechanical properties of materials to their electron state based on quantum mechanics, which is, however, complicated to be used in structural material design. It is highly desired to have simple but fundamental parameters, which reflect the electron behavior of materials, for material analysis and design in a feasible manner. The applicant has conducted extensive studies on electron work function (EWF) and demonstrated that EWF is correlated to various properties of materials, and is a promising indicator for guiding tailoring materials. However, material properties are dependent not only on properties of individual phases in a material but also its microstructure. When various phases with different EWFs are in contact, there exists electron transfer in order to establish thermodynamic equilibrium. These affect EWF distribution and thus overall performance. Understanding these issues will help develop new approaches or methodologies for material design and tailoring. The objectives of this project are 1) to investigate the relation between the overall EWF and those of individual phases, and its correlation with overall properties of materials; and 2) to develop EWF-based approaches or methodologies for material design and tailoring with focus on tribo-materials.