Nanomaterials may be small, but they offer a tremendous range of properties and possible applications. Carbon nanotubes can provide the foundation for multifunctional structures that sense and heal damage within themselves while also serving other roles such as energy storage, thermal management, and electromagnetic interference shielding.
Zachary Melrose, a graduate student in the Multifunctional Composites Lab at the University of Delaware, plans to exploit that potential in his doctoral research . Melrose has been awarded a prestigious National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship to support his development of multifunctional structural composites through the selective integration of nanomaterials in composites. He is advised by Erik Thostenson, assistant professor. (read more)