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Metallic Device Inducing Sparks Onto A Metal Surface

Six faculty members in the Dwight Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M University have received a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program to speed up the development and application of high temperature shape memory alloys (HTMAs).

The project, “DMREF: Accelerating the Development of Phase-Transforming Heterogeneous Materials: Application to High Temperature Shape Memory Alloys,” is led by Dr. Raymundo Arróyave, associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Collaborators on the project include: Dr. Ibrahim Karaman, head and Chevron Professor I in materials science and engineering; Dr. Amine Benzerga, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering; Dr. Dimitris Lagoudas, deputy director of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station and associate vice chancellor for engineering; Dr. Theocharis Baxevanis, TEES assistant research professor in aerospace engineering, and Dr. Edward R. Dougherty, Robert M. Kennedy ’26 Chair and distinguished professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The NSF, in support of the multi-agency federal Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), seeks to target one of the primary MGI goals — to halve the current time and cost for transitioning breakthroughs from the laboratory to the marketplace — a process that can take as long as two decades.

Texas A&M’s project attempts to accelerate the development of HTSMAs for compact and efficient solid-state actuation devices with applications in the aerospace and automotive industry. It combines ideas from informatics and design with experimental and computational materials science.

The project aims to shorten the time necessary for the development of HTSMAs equipped with tailored properties. It builds from the past and current research projects with NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and other leaders in the aerospace industry.