David Poerschke leads multi-institutional research to enhance ceramic durability

David Poerschke has received a planned $2 million multi-institutional award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to lead a collaborative project as part of the agency’s INTACT (Intrinsically Tough and Affordable Ceramics Today) Disruption Opportunity program.

Ceramics have a range of desirable properties, including being hard, lightweight, chemically inert, and stable at high temperatures. However, many applications of ceramics are limited by their low fracture toughness, which leads to brittle behavior. To address this issue, Poerschke is leading a new research effort to develop manufacturing methods that impart metal-like toughness to traditionally brittle ceramics. The approach leverages high-kinetic-energy particle impacts occurring during cold spray additive manufacturing to introduce a large population of dislocations, the same defects that impart ductility to metals, into ceramic crystal structures. 

The two-year project, titled R2-D2 C-3PO: Research for Robust Dislocation-Dense Ceramics via Cold Spray Collision Process Optimization, brings together university and industry partners. Teams at Florida International University (led by Prof. Tanaji Paul), Virginia Commonwealth University (Prof. Arvind Agarwal), and Solvus Global (Drs. Pin Lu and Victor Champagne) are leading cold spray process development and scale-up. Citrine Informatics (Dr. James Saal) is modeling the process, and the University of Illinois Chicago team (Prof. Matthew Daly) is  investigating the fracture behavior and dislocation stability.

DARPA is a research and development agency within the U.S. Department of Defense that drives transformational innovations to address national security challenges. One such effort is the INTACT Disruption Opportunity program, which aims to develop monolithic ceramics with ductility comparable to metals by leveraging intrinsic, atomistic-scale toughening mechanisms. 

Congratulations Professor David Poerschke! Learn more about his research, at the Poerschke Research Group’s website.

Learn more about the INTACT Disruption Opportunity Program at the DARPA website.