Aerospace Seminar

NASA JPL is the world's leader in robotic space exploration, as demonstrated by the recent success of the Mars Science Laboratory and its rover, Curiosity. JPL missions require engineering for extreme environments, which results in innovative materials solutions, new manufacturing technologies, novel fundamental science, and the generation of intellectual property. Developing and implementing materials for these missions is the focus of the new JPL Metallurgy Facility, founded by Dr. Hofmann in 2012. The focus of the new facility is to perform fundamental science research on new materials and manufacturing techniques to solve engineering problems that arise during NASA flight applications. The JPL Metallurgy Facility sits on the boundary between fundamental science and spacecraft implementation, which offers a unique opportunity for collaborative research between Lab and Campus. Scientific challenges are driven by real aerospace applications, which align well with the research thrusts of GALCIT.

The current talk focuses on some of the fundamental research that is happening at JPL in the materials and manufacturing areas, with emphasis on spurring collaborations between GALCIT and JPL. The talk will outline a broad range of scientific research that is being performed in collaboration with Caltech, USC, UCSD, and GaTech and will go into more detail on hypervelocity impact phenomena on new amorphous metal composite structures and on additive manufacturing technologies for gradient alloys. These two areas demonstrate the breadth of materials research being conducted at JPL and emphasizes the important of the connections between materials design, manufacturing, mechanical properties and applications.