News
(Friday 04/20/2018) Dr. Naraghi gave an invited talk about the Mechanics of Porous Carbon Nanofibers in Texas A&M University, Polymer Technology Industrial Consortium (PTIC) . The talk was well received by the audience from Academia and Industry.
Dr. Naraghi gave an invited talk about the Mechanics of Multifunctional Carbon Nanofibers in University of Wyoming. Dr. Ray Fertig was the host. The talk was received by students and faculty from Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science.
Congraduations to Ian, an undergraduate student from our lab, for having earned an internship in AFRL. Ian will continue our collaborations with AFRL on porous CNFs there.
Christopher Kuo LeBlanc Congratulations! on your award for last year’s ASME 2017 IMECE Track 19 poster session (News from November 2017)
Jizhe Cai Defended (post from January 2018) his PhD thesis! Well-done Dr. Cai. His work was on identifying the mechanics of carbon nanofibers subjected to templated graphitization. Wonderful presentation and Wonderful results.
Jizhe Defended (second from right)
Our group received new funding from Air Force Research Lab to study highly porous carbon nanofibers
The overarching goal of this project is to develop carbon nanofibers (CNFs) with multifunctional capabilities, such as load bearing, energy storage, and embedded sensing. The development of this novel material system can be broadly appealing in many applications, including aerospace sector, in which developing lighter structures as a means to enhance performance (maneuverability, fuel efficiency, endurance, etc) has been at the heart of materials design. An image of a porous CNF is shown in the figure below.
Yijun Chen, PhD candidate in our group, won the second place student poster session award in PTIC
Yijun Chen, PhD candidate in our group, won the second place student poster session award in Polymer Technology Industrial Consortium (PTIC) Student Poster Session. He presented his work on the encapsulation of functional materials, and controlled release, inside porous micro and nanofibers.
New PhD student joined our group
We are excited for Mr. Sumit Khatri to have joined our group as a PhD student. Sumit got his BSc from IIT, Kharagpur, India.
Our REU students, Isabel, Christian and Christopher did wonderful research this summer
Many thanks to Isabel Kalnin, Christian Grimme and Christopher Kuo-Leblanc made significant contributions to the research in our group, way more than expected to be done, only in 10 weeks! We are sad that they are leaving, but we hope that they come back. Also thanks to our graduate students Jizhe, Jamshid, Yijun and Kai who stood along their side and mentored them.
- Isabel pushed the limits in developing hollow carbon nanfibers with wall thickness of ~10-20 nm,
- Christopher developed a variation of melt electrospinning to develop low micron and submicron polymeric fibers,
- Christian made an in-house setup capable of mass producing single threads of PAN nanofibers with a very narrow diameter distribution.
