Browsing by Author "Hwang, Sung Hoon"

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    Bottom-Up Synthesis of Mechanically Enhanced Industrial Composites
    (2018-08-20) Hwang, Sung Hoon; Shahsavari, Rouzbeh
    Fine-tuning physicochemical properties of nano- or submicron materials and utilizing them as fundamental building blocks for a larger, multifunctional material is now the common strategy in the field of materials engineering. The remarkable depth and breadth of advanced synthesis and characterization techniques have now enabled this “bottom-up” fabrication of materials for diverse industries, which consistently demand strong and tough materials with novel functional properties. Most importantly, this bottom-up approach has proposed new solutions for overcoming inherent limitations of ceramic materials, which are strong but also, highly brittle. Despite being a common synthetic approach, there is still a myriad of industrial materials or composites, for which the aforesaid bottomup approach is yet to be applied. Therefore, my Ph.D research is focused on engineering and evaluating properties of nano- and submicron-sized particles, for example, size, porosity and mechanical properties of ultrafine calcium silicate particles and chemical properties of two dimensional materials such as graphene and boron nitride and assembling them via various synthetic techniques to produce a composite with enhanced mechanical properties. Unprecedented synthetic pathways coupled with effective fine-tuning of properties at submicron scale and hybridization of building units, such as calcium silicate porous particles integrated with bisphenol A diglycidyl ether will propose new strategies to apply the advanced bioinspired concept to low-cost and abundant calcium silicate-based materials. The project will potentially impact diverse industries ranging from refractory and insulation materials to construction industry and bone-tissue engineering, where the common or newly rising materials suffer from shortcomings in mechanical properties, which prevent their widespread commercialization.