Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 4 No. 1 Spring 2019 | Page 12

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Zheng receives ONR Award
Xiaoyu ‘Rayne’ Zheng, assistant professor
of mechanical engineering in the College of
Engineering, has received an Office of Naval
Research 2019 Young Investigator award to
study rational design and additive manu-
facturing of 3D piezoelectrics with arbitrary
anisotropy for maritime self-sensing struc-
tures. The work will be done as part of ONR’s
Maritime Sensing Program.
The ability to tailor energy transduction ma-
terials are critical to meet demanding oper-
ational environments where weight, robust-
ness, and performance are equally important.
The three-year, $750,000 project aims to
develop design and additive manufacturing
techniques to advance the knowledge and
capabilities for developing novel transducer
and sensing platforms.
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“Traditionally, you would have to deal with
the existing properties within the materials
you are given and distribute a large number
of sensors onto your target of interests,” said
Zheng. “Our goal is to rationally design the
structural-property relationships to enable a
variety of customizable acoustic sensing and
transduction applications with only a frac-
tion of their parent materials.”
The Office of Naval Research Young Inves-
tigator Program is one of the nation’s oldest
and most selective science and technolo-
gy basic research programs. Its purpose is
to fund early-career academic researchers
whose scientific pursuits show outstanding
promise for supporting the Department of
Defense, while also promoting their profes-
sional development.
Zheng is one of only 25 awardees this year,
selected from more than 260 applicants, all
of whom were college and university faculty
and who obtained their doctoral degrees in
the past seven years.
In addition to the ONR award, Zheng re-
ceived the 2018 Air Force Young Investigator
Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific
Research for his work developing flexible
inorganic metamaterials for future flight
structures; and a Junior Faculty Award in
2017 from the Institute for Critical Technolo-
gy and Applied Science.