Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 2 No. 4 Winter 2017 | Page 17

Opposite page: Ryan Hensleigh, Huachen
Cui, and Hongshun Chen, doctoral students
in Zheng's group, inspect a high tempera-
ture ceramic micro nozzle array.
Above and right - High temperature pre-
cision ceramic 3-D components including
microscale gears and micro ceramic nozzle
arrays. Each tooth and nozzle head has a
diameter of less than 10 microns.
are,” Zheng said. “As you reduce the size, the
purity increases. The cracks are far smaller at
the nano level than they are at visible levels.
If you can start the printing process from the
smaller level and build up, you can maintain the
mechanical, thermal, and energy conversion
properties, and strength that make materials
both lightweight, strong and damage tolerant.”
One recent example funded by this research
are high temperature precision ceramics, which
have shown exceptional strength while main-
taining ultralight weight.
Graduate researchers Ryan Hensleigh and
Huachen Cui, from Zheng’s group, have recently
created a variety of miniaturized 3-D printed
materials that shows great promise. “We have
shown that owning to the reduction of feature
sizes, as you make each ligament that comprise
the ceramic lattice thinner and thinner, you will
actually gain strength as a reduction of weight,”
Zheng said.
Their team’s results are being published as an
invited article on a Focus issue of the Journal of
Materials Research.
“As we keep shrinking the feature sizes of
each ligament while maintaining the footprint,
a myriad of desirable properties still remain to
be discovered.” Zheng noted as he plans on his
investigations. We can create a variety of ultra-
light and strong tailorable ceramic materials.
Additionally, Zheng’s group has been working
on tailorable functionality for these ceramics,
including dielectric, piezoelectricity and energy
harvesting applications and integrating these
materials for a variety of device applications
and smart lightweight infrastructures.
MOMENTUM
WINTER'17

PAGE 17