Aerospace Materials

Catalog description

Advanced materials are critical to improve performance, safety, and sustainability of air flight and space exploration in extreme environments. This course provides a survey of engineering knowledge on existing and future advanced materials for aerospace applications, and provides multiple opportunities for students to apply this knowledge and to analyze existing tailored aerospace materials of high performance. First, class participants will review the origins of the material properties: atomic bonding and packing, grains and boundaries, interfaces/interphases, and micro-structuring. Second, the participants will learn about common aerospace materials (metal alloys, ceramics, and polymer composites); how these materials satisfy the tight performance requirements and withstand extreme environments. Third, novel material design (nanocomposites and metamaterials), mostly in the nano and micro scales, and how their micro-structures drive their advanced properties will be discussed, together with their current challenges in applications (material design, scalable fabrication, and certification).