UC Davis and Los Alamos National Laboratory have established a new joint institute to train graduate students and lab employees in materials design and development — an area of particular interest to the national lab and of increasing importance over the next decade.

"What's really exciting about the institute is that it will expose our students to the state-of-the-art research and facilities at Los Alamos," said Enrique Lavernia, dean of the College of Engineering at UC Davis and principal investigator on the proposal. It will help create a pipeline for the national laboratory to recruit talented young scientists and engineers, he said.

"The fact that Los Alamos came to us with this proposal is recognition of the strength of our faculty and programs, and the quality of our students," Lavernia said.

Research in the institute will concentrate on three areas: advanced visualization and computational techniques to look deep inside materials; built-in sensors that can report on the state of a material or a structure, and even take action to prevent failures; and developing new kinds of materials with novel properties.

The national lab is providing about $1 million per year for five years to support up to 13 graduate students. It will also provide one month of summer funding for eight to 10 faculty members, allowing them to pursue research projects related to the institute, said Billy Sanders, director of research development in the Office of Research at UC Davis. Sanders is co-director of the institute, with Dan Thoma of the Los Alamos lab. Niels Gronbech Jensen, professor in the Department of Applied Science at UC Davis, is the faculty coordinator.

Los Alamos researchers will serve as mentors to teams of UC Davis faculty, students and postdoctoral researchers. During the summers, students will spend time at the Los Alamos laboratory, pursuing their research and collaborating with lab researchers. The national laboratory will provide two specially designated fellowships to support graduate students for advanced degrees in the area of materials design and development.

The link to campus will also enable lab employees to continue their education by taking classes at UC Davis and working towards masters' and doctorate degrees in materials science.

At the undergraduate level, the institute will run a summer program for up to 20 promising students from across the nation. The best will be offered fellowships to pursue a graduate degree through the institute and UC Davis.

Interdisciplinary

Materials science is fundamental to other advances in technology, from energy and electronics to transportation and structural engineering, Lavernia said. At the same time, the subject has a deep reach into basic sciences and is highly interdisciplinary.

Closer ties between materials scientists at UC Davis and at the Los Alamos lab bring potential benefits to both, Sanders said. The institute will draw on the expertise at UC Davis in using computers to visualize data to find new ways to see within solid, dense materials. By combining many two-dimensional slices, and

developing new mathematical techniques, researchers hope to reconstruct cracks, flaws and other structures inside materials and eventually allow engineers to virtually walk inside their material.

Sanders said that engineers are now designing structures with embedded sensors, for example aircraft wings with built-in strain gauges that can issue an alert if the wing is about to fail. Engineers might be able to build structures with sensors that not only report problems, but act on them. For example, a sensor could detect that a critical bolt is working loose and automatically tighten it.

Jointly developed

"We'll be looking at what kinds of measurements, such as stress or temperature, can be made with what material," Sanders said.

With offices and labs at both Los Alamos and Davis, the institute will use live internet-based video and audio conferencing to link classes and students. Courses will be jointly developed by UC Davis faculty and national lab staff, and approved through UC Davis.

The Materials Design Institute is one of a number of partnerships that Los Alamos is establishing within the UC system and with New Mexico universities, focusing on research areas and educational disciplines of strong interest to the national lab.