A team of engineers at the University of Delaware is developing next-generation smart textiles by creating flexible carbon nanotube composite coatings on a wide range of fibers, including cotton, nylon and wool. Their discovery is reported in the journal ACS Sensors where they demonstrate the ability to measure an exceptionally wide range of pressure – from the light touch of a fingertip to being driven over by a forklift.

Fabric coated with this sensing technology could be used in future “smart garments” where the sensors are slipped into the soles of shoes or stitched into clothing for detecting human motion. (read more)

An entrepreneurial team based at the University of Delaware is working to commercialize a system that could make infrastructure such as bridges and pipelines safer. The team, called Smartenius, consists of Hao Liu (Entrepreneurial Lead), Hongbo Dai (Team Member), Erik Thostenson (Faculty Advisor) and William Johnson (Business Mentor).

Almost 40 percent of America’s bridges are 50 years or older, and 188 million daily trips happen on structurally deficient bridges, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Sometimes emergency bridge repairs can avert a crisis in the nick of time, such as the fixes to Delaware’s I-495 bridge in 2014 after engineers found cracks in its concrete and deformations in its steel piles. However, those fast repairs can be costly — in this case, $45 million for three months. (read more)

Erik Thostenson’s fascination with composite materials grew out of his love for downhill skiing. “I was intrigued that the performance characteristics of various skis could be remarkably different, yet the skis themselves could look identical,” he says. “The same basic materials — graphite, carbon, and Kevlar — are used in most high-tech skis, but advanced composite technology enables mogul skis to be flexible while racing skis are stiff.”

Two decades later, Thostenson is still fascinated with these high-tech materials and their almost limitless potential to be tailored for applications far beyond high-performance skis. 

Now a professor affiliated with UD’s Center for Composite Materials, he recently received a prestigious five-year, $400,000 Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to investigate a new processing approach for novel multi-scale hybrid composites with functionally graded material properties. (read more)

Aging, deterioration and extreme events like earthquakes and hurricanes can take a toll on roads, bridges and other structures. With damage and defects often invisible, the search is on for systems that can monitor the health of structures and alert their owners to potential problems and even impending catastrophic failure.

Several years ago, Erik Thostenson and Thomas Schumacher, both affiliated faculty members in the University of Delaware’s Center for Composite Materials, began to explore the use of carbon nanotube composites as a kind of “smart skin” for structures. 

Now, they have improved on this approach with the addition of another technique called electrical impedance tomography (EIT), which uses surface electrode measurements to create an image of the conductivity of a material or structure. While EIT has been used as a noninvasive medical imaging technique since the 1980s, it has largely been overlooked by the structural health monitoring community. (read more)

Steel is the most recycled material in the world. But there are questions as to whether structural steel can be safely reused in buildings and, if so, under what conditions.

A multidisciplinary team involving Jennifer McConnell and Thomas Schumacher in Civil Engineering and Erik Thostenson in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science have been awarded a three-year $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to lay the foundation for a new paradigm to reuse structural steel members in contrast to recycling them.

In this project, the Multifunctional Composites Lab will investigate the use of smart sensing skins for monitoring construction-induced stresses in buildings. (read more)

Rossiny Beaucejour, who is pursuing his senior thesis in the Multifunctional Composites Laboratory presented at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS) in Nashville, Tenn., last month, winning first place in Nanotechnology.

Rossiny, who is also a McNair Scholar at UD, presented a poster, “Locally Patterned Carbon Nanotubes for Bio-Inspired Sensing of Deformation and Damage in Composite Materials.” (read more)

In August 2007, the I-35W Bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed, killing 13 people and injuring 145. The collapse was attributed to a design deficiency that resulted in a gusset plate failing during ongoing construction work. Now, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Delaware is developing a novel structural health monitoring system that could avert such disasters in the future.

Erik Thostenson and Thomas Schumacher have received a three-year $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the use of carbon nanotube composites as a kind of “smart skin” for structures. (read more)

Nanomaterials are tiny but mighty, offering the potential for use in a vast array of applications from fuel cells to drug delivery systems. Their size—the diameter of a nano-fiber is approximately one-thousandth that of a human hair—underlies both their power and the challenge of harnessing that power.

“Strange things happen when materials get that small,” says Erik Thostenson, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Delaware. “Exploiting the unique properties of nanomaterials requires a highly integrated approach involving scientists and engineers from diverse fields. For engineers to be well versed in nanotechnology, it’s crucial to introduce the topic early.” (read more)

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)

Two undergraduate students from the Multifunctional Composites Lab at the University of Delaware won high honors at the 2011 SAMPE Student Symposium in Long Beach, Calif., May 23-26.

Zachary Melrose won a first place award for his work on “Damage Sensing in Adhesively-Bonded Composite/ Steel Joints Using Carbon Nanotubes.” Sarah Friedrich earned second place for her work on the “Influence of Calendering on Carbon Nanotube/ Polymer Composites for In Situ Damage Sensing.” (read more)

Cedric Jacob (left), a current Ph.D. student in the Multifunctional Composites Lab, and John Gangloff (right) won the Owens Corning International Composite App Challenge. Their winning concept, an integrated structural composite fuel cell, exploits the benefits of advanced composites to lower vehicle weight, increase power output, and significantly reduce the cost of manufacturing and assembly.

Jacob and Gangloff, both current Ph.D. students in mechanical engineering, received their undergraduate degrees at UD and were both undergraduate researchers in the Multifunctional Composites Lab. (read more)