Material

Military platforms—such as ships, aircraft and ground vehicles—rely on advanced materials to make them lighter, stronger and more resistant to stress, heat and other harsh environmental conditions. Currently, the process for developing new materials to field in platforms frequently takes more than a decade. This lengthy process often means that …

Atomic clusters, consisting of a few to a few thousand atoms, have emerged over the past 40 years as the ultimate nanoparticles, whose structure and properties can be controlled one atom at a time. More importantly, the possibility of creating a new class of materials, composed of clusters instead of …

REEs are a series of chemical elements found in the Earth’s crust that are essential components of many technologies, including electronics, computer and communication systems, transportation, health care, and national defense. Rare Earths Elements (REE) are incorporated into many sophisticated technologies with both commercial and defense applications including smartphones and …

SMAs are materials that can be deformed at low temperature and recover their original shape upon heating. Shape memory alloys (SMAs) belong to a class of shape memory materials (SMMs), which have the ability to ‘memorise’ or retain their previous form when subjected to certain stimulus such as thermo mechanical …

“Electronics have dramatically changed the way we live, conduct business, communicate, and educate. Visions of the future foretell of ubiquitous computing and sensing. However, the environments in which electronics can reliably operate are limited. In consumer applications, typical operating temperatures range from -40° to 85°C. The “wider” military temperature range …

To date, different types of carbon and alloy steels have proved to be the main materials of choice for naval ship construction around the world. While composites, titanium and aluminium alloys have been utilized for making hulls of smaller vessels such as patrol boats, these materials do not meet the …

Next-generation radar systems are critical to providing situational awareness of the entire networked battlefield. Active Electronically Steered Array (AESA) antennas have revolutionized the performance of modern radars, communication and electronic warfare systems by greatly reducing the maintenance costs and failure rates, enhancing scanning speed and accuracy, more resistant to interference …

Silicon (Si) based microelectronics, that had revolutionized electronics, computing and communications, has reached its limits and researchers are exploring various technologies to replace silicon, that can satisfy humanity’s need for faster, smaller, greener and more powerful computers. One of class of materials, that are being explored are Phase-change materials (or …

Metallic glasses are new type of glass that are  extremely strong, hard, and resistant to wear and corrosion, all of which make them good potential candidates for engineering uses, including electronics casings, and medical uses such as surgical pins and stents. Metallic glass can withstand heavy impacts without deforming – even when …