This award supports Professor Traugott Fischer of Stevens Institute of Technology to collaborate in materials engineering research with Professor Alain Mocellin of the Ceramics Laboratory of the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. The objective of their collaboration is to enhance understanding of the properties of certain advanced ceramics and of the processing techniques for achieving them. The Swiss group will prepare test ceramics with well defined processing and properties, and provide these to the U.S. group for further study. Tribological research at Stevens will then relate friction and wear of the ceramics to the mechanical properties of the materials. These properties depend on the size of the grains, the nature of the additives and the processing. The collaborative arrangement efficiently links two laboratories with complementary equipment to produce, characterize and test the behavior of novel ceramic materials. There is presently intense activity in many countries with the aim of developing and applying novel high performance ceramics. Some notable successes have been achieved, mainly in the metal forming and cutting industries, but the wider application of these materials, for example in textile machinery and advanced engines, is still meeting with mixed results. Success in the fabrication and application of these materials will follow the further development of our understanding of their properties and of the processing techniques for producing them.
