(From article originally posted on ME webpage)
Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professors Ashley Spear and Michael Czabaj and Associate Professor Tom Fletcher from the School of Computing have been awarded a four-year grant from the NSF for $952K to study open-cell metallic foams. The University of Utah team, led by Spear, will partner with a firm that specializes in manufacturing such foams. The grant is jointly funded by two NSF programs, Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) and Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI), and is entitled “DMREF/GOALI: Novel 3D Experiments, Simulations, and Optimization for Accelerated Design of Metallic Foams”.
The new NSF award will support research to enable an accelerated and performance-based design paradigm for open-cell metallic foams through the integration of emergent methods in 3D materials characterization with multi-scale modeling and Bayesian optimization. The new design paradigm will be made possible through the discovery of process-structure-property relationships in the foams.
