Nanocomposites and hierarchical nanoengineered materials

How can nanotechnology redefine the next generation of aerospace materials?

Bulk nanostructured materials offer tremendous opportunity for re-inventing materials, but also pose challenges both in terms of characterization, processing, design, scaling, and manufacturing.

This talk will present recent work developing nanoengineered hierarchical advanced (aerospace-grade) composites with enhanced mechanical properties, with a focus recently on physics that allows imparting multifunctionality, and resulting technologies.

Such hybrid nanoengineered advanced composites employ aligned nanofibers (in most of our work, aligned carbon nanotubes, A-CNTs) in several architectures to enhance bulk properties of existing aerospace-grade advanced composites. Building multifunctionality concurrent with these mechanical property improvements includes thermal and electrical conductivity tailoring for ice protection, damage sensing, and self-manufacturing, among others.

For example, out-of-oven (OoO) manufacturing utilizes conductive heating from flexible nanostructured CNT films to conductively, rather than convectively, heat the composite, resulting in 2-3 orders of magnitude reduction in required energy, opening up new possibilities including (when combined with a new nanoporous membrane) autoclave-free composite manufacturing.
Fundamental studies on polymer-nanofiber interactions via variable-volume fraction (vol%) A-CNT polymer nanocomposites, including processing limits to ultra-high vol% systems, led to the development of a combined top-down and bottom-up fabrication methodology for nanocomposites that addresses the key issues (agglomeration, viscosity, scale, alignment) that have frustrated the use of nanomaterials as bulk composites.

Research in related areas including carbon nanostructure catalysis, nanomaterials in microelectronics and energy storage, 3D damage progression via x-ray tomography, and new work on aligned hexagonal boron nitride nanotubes (A-hBNNTs) including in-space radiation testing will be introduced as time allows.

Speaker

Brian L. Wardle is the Apollo Program Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, with a joint appointment in Mechanical Engineering, where his work focuses on materials and structures. He received a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 1992 and completed S.M. and Ph.D. work at MIT in the Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1995 and 1998, respectively. After four years at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. as an Associate and Engagement Manager, in 2003 Prof. Wardle joined the faculty of MIT. His research interests are in the areas of nanoengineered advanced composites, bulk nanostructured materials, carbon-based material synthesis, mechanics of additively manufactured structures, multifunctional materials including energy storage, and other structure and materials topics. Prof. Wardle is Founder and Director of the necstlab research group and MIT’s Nano-Engineered Composite aerospace STructures (NECST) industry Consortium. Prof. Wardle is active in the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN), MIT Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL), and MIT. Nano communities at MIT.

His research focuses on bulk nanostructured materials, particularly nanoengineered hierarchical advanced composites with enhanced mechanical properties, with recent extensions towards multiple types of multifunctionality. Highlights from recent work include conception and fabrication of aligned carbon nanotubes (CNT) nanoengineered composite laminate architectures, development and realization of a nanostructured aerovehicle ice protection system, x-ray synchrotron radiation computed tomography (SRCT) investigations of damage development in nanoengineered composites, discovery of a new class of oxide catalysts for carbon nanotube (CNT) synthesis, creation of novel polymer and ceramic matrix nanocomposites, invention of out-of-oven manufacturing for advanced composite laminates, and nanomaterials for additive manufacturing (AM).

Past work includes nonlinear design and operation of thermomechanically stable ultra-thin fuel cells operating in the postbuckling regime, and development and experimental verification of a design tool for optimal-power MEMS energy harvesters. Prof. Wardle has authored over 100 journal articles, given more than 80 invited talks, holds ~60 patents (with ~20 others pending) that have been licensed by small and large companies, and was the principal and technical Founder of n12 Technologies (now NAWAH) and a co-Founder of SimpliMade Composites.
Professor Wardle’s educational activities cover experimentation and modeling of materials and structures, and he has collaborated on two major art-science projects, notably The Last Pictures project that launched an art artifact into orbit. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society (FRAeS), and Chaired the NT24 Conference on the Science and Applications of Nanotubes held at MIT June 2024.