A Look at Designing Extreme Materials
Michael Demkowicz is a new assistant professor in MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Demkowicz designs materials for extreme environments such as high temperature, high stress, and radiation damage - with a focus on energy applications.
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Transcript
00:00:00 My name is Michael Demkowicz and I am a new professor at material science and engineering here at MIT. And I work on designing materials for extreme environments. Extreme environments are instances of extremely high temperature or high stresses, radiation damage, all kinds of grueling conditions under which materials have to survive, especially
00:00:24 in energy applications. My work focuses on designing materials to withstand extreme environments. Conventional engineering alloys sustain severe damage when irradiated. But specially designed nanocomposites that contain a very high volume fraction of interfaces can absorb damage as it's being created, recombine it, and cause the material to self-heal. The movie that you're seeing is showing
00:00:54 how we do that in the case of radiation damage. That means that a material that's operating under extreme environments and contains these sorts of interfaces is not going to become more brittle. It's not going to corrode as fast. It will be able to remain in operation for a longer period of time and operate in a reliable way.