This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The research objective of this Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) Collaborative Research award is to develop capabilities for engineering surfaces with specific micro-scale and ultrafine grained structures, and enhanced mechanical properties, directly by machining. It brings together the complementary strengths of Purdue, the University of California Santa Barbara, University of Pittsburgh, M4 Sciences, Cummins and Seco Tools (Sweden) in a collaboration building on early observations that machining offers a controlled method of severe plastic deformation and that this severe plastic deformation can be exploited to effect microstructure refinement. The research approach will be based on modeling of the severe plastic deformation at different length scales, including microstructure and texture development arising from interactive effects of strain rate, strain and temperature in the deformation zone. The models will incorporate crystal plasticity. Model predictions will be compared with direct measurement of the deformation parameters made using advanced optical techniques, and characterization of microstructure by transmission electron microscopy, nano-indentation and electron back scatter diffraction.
If successful, the broader impact of the results will be enhanced scientific understanding of severe plastic deformation and microstructure development in machining, and its practical utilization in the discrete products sector to engineer component surfaces with improved properties and performance. The results will be applicable also to a broad class of deformation processes and wear phenomena. Complementing the research is an education and training program that includes short-term student visits to industrial partners and exposure to international research participation; summer undergraduate research internships; and a short-course on deformation-microstructure phenomena for practitioners.
