NSF-DFG PROJECT  

                                                 Materials World Network:
              Multi-Scale Study of Chemical Vapor Infiltrated C/C Composites

 Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany

Institute of Engineering Mechanics
   Prof. T. Böhlke
   Dr. R. Piat 
   Dipl.-Inform. S. Lin


Institute  for Chemical Technology and Polymer Chemistry
   Prof. O. Deutschmann
   Dr. A. Li
   Dr. B. Reznik
   S. Lichtenberg

  * Conference Proceedings (2009) / Talks (2008, 2009)
  * Conference Proceedings / Talks (2010)

 University of New Hampshire, USA

Mechanical Engineering Department
   Prof. I. Tsukrov
   Prof. T. Gross

   * Conference Proceedings / Talks (2010)

The proposed project will be conducted in close collaboration by the researchers from the University of New Hampshire (UNH), USA and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. The formation of this collaborative team is motivated by mutually complementing sets of expertise and facilities, by the history of productive collaboration, and by the desire to provide students and young researchers from both countries with a meaningful and challenging international research experiences.

KIT is one of only three German universities that are designated as “elite” universities. This status was won in a very tense final round of the Excellence Initiative in October 2006. In December 2007, UKA was united with the Karlsruhe Research Center under the name of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). For nine years (1998-2007), Karlsruhe University was a location of the Center of Excellence in Research 551 "Carbon from the gas phase: elementary reactions, structures, materials” supported by DFG. As one of the leading European research group working on carbon and carbon-based materials, the Center accumulated extensive expertise and state-of-the-art equipment to manufacture and characterize the carbon/carbon composites of interest including several CVI reactors as well as advanced microscopy and micro computed tomography facilities. It will be a tremendous opportunity for the UNH students to work in such an advanced facility. They will be able to propose and execute experiments on a level that is not currently possible at UNH. Their work will be subjected to critical evaluation that can only come from peer investigators who are also “stakeholders” in the project. Accordingly, the investigators at KIT will benefit from the fresh, but intimate outside perspective on their approach brought by UNH students and senior collaborators.

UNH is a Category I research institution. In 2006 the awards received by UNH from various competitive research proposals amounted to $128 million dollars. The UNH team for this project combines an advanced expertise in micromechanical modeling and characterization of composite materials on various length scales with the corresponding facilities that include the Computational Mechanics Laboratory, the Atomic Force Microscopy Laboratory and the Materials Laboratory. German graduate students and visiting scientists will find at UNH a dynamic and challenging international environment with a constant string of foreign graduate students and post-doctoral scholars conducting research with the Materials Science Program and Mechanical Engineering Department.