The Important Role of Carbon Fiber In The Field of Engineering

Probably the well-accepted field that we can consider across all courses by all ages is the field of engineering. Parents love it when they heard of their children quickly mention the word "engineer" when asked what their ambitions in life would be. Their faces look more radiant when finally, they get to attend their now grown kids' graduation day as they march and get their diploma. Finally, they have their own engineers!

But what is it with engineering that made it so loved by almost all people? For one, engineering is a diverse discipline. Almost every where we look at, we see traces of engineering. There are aerospace, civil, electrical and mechanical, to name a few, not to mention the many other sub-engineering fields within those mentioned. No wonder, this field is a vital part of our lives. What is more remarkable to think about are the materials applied to these various engineering fields. It is a known fact that the metal used in one field can also be used by another field in a totally different application, yet equally important project! Carbon fiber is one trusted material for this.

It is imperative to know what and how these fibers are composed so that we may learn to appreciate this material even more. For instance, it is considerably awesome to think that this material is consists of intensely thin and fine threads of fibers no more than 0.0015 to 0.010 micro meters in diameter. But the greatest part here is that each filament is composed of thousands of carbon atoms. It is generally factoid that carbon alone as an element is highly stable. It has magnificent strength and can withstand high temperature. What more if this substance is multiplied a thousand times into carbon atoms, and then spun together with the help of the tiniest crystals not seen by the naked eyes! We are talking about strength a thousand times! When these fibers form an alignment, the pattern created form a much stronger material.

It brings us no surprise then that this same material may be considered as a vital engineering tool. In aero space engineering, for instance, trust the properties of carbon fiber like its physical strength, light in weight and specific toughness. This has been an essential part of some air frame parts and applications widely used, like ailerons, strut fairings, wing parts and even the vortex generators.

In the field of Civil Engineering, since it is basically dedicated to design, maintenance and construction of roads, bridges and the likes, it deals largely with the said fibers as well for the construction and re-construction of bridges, dams, buildings and canals. In this field alone, there are many uses of this material that it made its way from public sectors, to more domesticated private homeowners.

Professor Thomas Webster Elected to College of Fellows of AIMBE

Thomas Webster, associate professor at the School of Engineering and the Department of Orthopaedics at Brown University, has been elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). Located in Washington D.C., AIMBE is the leading advocacy group for medical and biological engineering and is comprised of some of the most important leaders in science and engineering, the top 2% of medical and biological engineers.

The College of Fellows of AIMBE is comprised of an exemplary group of approximately 900 medical and biological engineers. Founded in 1991, AIMBE has earned a reputation as a prestigious public policy leader on issues impacting the medical and biological community and is regarded as the preeminent voice in the field.

Webster received his bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, and his master’s degree and and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Professor Webster directs the Nanomedicine Laboratory which designs, synthesizes, and evaluates nanophase materials for various implant applications. Nanophase materials are central to the field of nanotechnology and are materials with one dimension less than 100 nm. Materials investigates to date include nanophase ceramics, metals, polymers, carbon fibers, and composites. Organ systems evaluated to date include orthopedic, cartilage, vascular, bladder, and the central and peripheral nervous systems.

His lab group has generated four books, 33 book chapters, 85 invited presentations (including tutorials), 215 literature articles and/or conference proceeding, and 245 conference presentations. Professor Webster has been awarded 11 full patents plus four provisional patents in his 11 years in academics (five years at Brown and six years at Purdue). His technology has resulted in one start-up company. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Nanomedicine and is on the editorial board of ten other journals. He has organized over 25 symposia at academic conferences. Dr. Webster was the 2002 recipient of the Biomedical Engineering Society Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award, the 2004 recipient of the Outstanding Young Investigator Award for the Schools of Engineering at Purdue University, the 2004 finalist for the Young Investigator Award of the American Society for Nanomedicine, and the 2005 recipient of the Wallace Coulter Foundation Early Career Award.

Anastassia Astafieva ’12 and Karine Ip Kiun Chong ’12 Win Halpin Prize

Thanks to the generosity of Doris M. and Norman T. Halpin, the Brown University School of Engineering Executive Committee provides research awards for exceptional undergraduates. Projects are awarded based on how well they demonstrate the power of interdisciplinary thought in engineering science and design. This year's winners of the Halpin Prize for Interdisciplinary Senior Capstone Projects are Anastassia Astafieva ’12 (advisors Christian Franck and Domenico Pacifici) and Karine Ip Kiun Chong ’12 (advisor Shreyhas Mandre). Each winner will receive a $750 student prize and a $2500 research fund.

From Ana’s Nomination:

Right from the start, Ana showed a strong interest in the interdisciplinary nature of a biomedical engineering design project that lies at the intersection of electrical, mechanical and biomedical engineering. After several discussions and conversations with Professor Pacifici and Professor Franck, Ana began the groundwork on her project to measure hydrogel and tissue scaffold deformations under spatially controlled applied electromechanical forces. Her project builds upon concepts from chemistry, cell biology, materials science and mechanical and electrical engineering, and is a genuinely innovative and interdisciplinary project.

The design of her senior capstone project features an in-vitro test bench or assay to apply spatially controlled forces to tissue mimicking hydrogels and scaffolds in all three dimensions. The mechanical properties of tissues and synthetic implant materials are extremely important in achieving proper physiological homeostasis in the human body, which requires experimental techniques to quantify them. The last decade has urged the scientific community to develop in-vitro methodologies that are able to measure quantities of interest in three dimensions thus representing a more realistic in-vivo or body-like setting. While three-dimensional measurements are intrinsically more challenging that traditional two-dimensional data collection and experimental design, Ana has accepted the challenge to do just that.

She is in the process of developing an electromagnetic field assay to generate physical forces inside tissue-mimicking hydrogels. By applying a magnetic field similar to that in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to micron-sized magnetic particles inside a hydrogel, Ana will determine the three-dimensional displacements that these magnetic particles undergo. Utilizing her Newtonian mechanics and electrostatics and magnetism principles, Ana will be able to determine the mechanical properties of these gels and tissues at micron and nanometer length scales in all three dimensions. Thus, through her capstone project she will be able to deliver a powerful characterization tool to the biomedical and engineering communities to aid in the development of improved implant materials and artificial tissues.

From Karine’s Nomination:

Karine is a talented mechanical engineer interested in a variety of subjects with sound understanding of mathematics, physics and engineering. She came up with her own research program about six months ago, and has since not only demonstrated successful technical expertise in executing the research but also has managed to disseminate the results.

Karine’s project is about bio-inspired desalination. The largest source of fresh water on this planet comes from natural desalination of ocean water through rain. Artificial desalination using various technologies also provides a small portion of the fresh water humans use. Karine asked herself, how do we create rain in a small container in our living room, and came up with quite interesting ideas. Her first idea was the observation that plants are very efficient at evaporating water from the soil. Is it possible to design an engineering process that mimics plants in transporting and evaporating water? Karine's second idea for condensing the water was to mimic Namibian fog-harvesting beetles. Tiny bumps on the backs of these fog-harvesting beetles have a special surface chemistry that facilitates the condensation of water, and moreover forms structures that channels the condensed water straight to the beetle’s mouth. Karine brought both these ideas to her advisor as a proposal for her 2011 summer Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (UTRA). Karine’s proposal secured the summer UTRA and she demonstrated her technical expertise during the summer research. She carried out a computational simulation of a toy mathematical model to demonstrate the principle reason behind the efficient evaporation through plant leaves. This result has increased her confidence in the research program and she has now designed a set of microfluidic devices to test her result experimentally. These devices mimic the properties of the leaves, especially the distribution of stomata on a leaf surface, to assist evaporation.

Karine actively participates in the scientific community and disseminates her research discoveries. She presented a poster on this in the Undergraduate Summer Research Symposium at Brown, and is scheduled to present a poster at the New England Workshop on Mechanics of Materials and Structures. She acquired a partial travel grant from the American Physical Society to present a poster of her results at the annual meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics in Baltimore in November. The prize funds for the project will be used to experimentally test the principle Karine has discovered. The experiment essentially consists of subjecting the microfluidic devices Karine designed to air flow in a small wind tunnel and measuring the evaporation rate through each. Her prediction is that the evaporation rate will increase with the air flow but reach a state of marginal returns as the air speed is increased beyond a critical value, and this critical value is different for each of Karine’s devices. The results from these experiments can be directly compared with evaporation from leaves to check if the leaves are optimized for particular wind speeds.