Dear Colleagues:
You are cordially invited to submit an abstract to the symposium on "Nanostructured Materials including Nanocrystalline Materials, Nanoporous Materials, Active Nanomaterials and Structures." This mini symposium is listed under Track 21 -- Processing and Engineering Applications of Novel Materials as (21-2 Symposium on Multifunctional Materials and Structures) at the 2007 ASME IMECE, which will be held on Nov. 12-15, 2007 in Seattle, Washington.
It is well known that metals are hardened by deformation and soften by annealing. How about nanostructured metals? Can we reply on conventional metal-working lore?
Although nanostructures, such as nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanowires, nanobelts, and nanometer thick films, nanostructured materials and nanocomposites have been synthesized and fabricated by various techniques, their mechanical properties have not been well explored. These nanostructures are being used as structural and functional building blocks to construct micro/nanodevices. Some nanostructured materials exhibit the breakdown of Hall-Petch behavior. The failure of conventional reinforcing models has been found in nanocomposites. The extremely small dimensions of nanomaterials and micro/nanodevices impose tremendous challenges to many existing experimental techniques and modeling tools. An in-depth understanding of mechanics at the nanoscale is greatly needed. Development of mechanical testing, and manipulation instruments and techniques, is also a technological necessity. This symposium will focus on research on mechanical properties of nanostructures, nanostructured materials and nanocomposites, and reliability testing of micro/nanodevices.
Professor Rodney Ruoff and colleagues at Northwestern University and Purdue University have developed a process that promises to lead to the creation of a new class of composite materials - graphene-based materials. They reported the results of their research in Nature, 442 (2006) 282-286. This team has overcome the difficulties of yielding a uniform distribution of graphene-based sheets in a polymer matrix. Such composites can be readily processed using standard industrial technologies such as moulding and hot-pressing. The technique should be applicable to a wide variety of polymers. The graphene composites may compete with carbon nanotube-based materials in terms of mechanical properties. This new class of composites may stimulate the applied mechanics community to study the fundamental reinforcing mechanisms of graphene sheets from both experimental and theoretical approaches.
