ASU engineers, scientists in line to receive almost $9 million for Dept. of Defense research

Two teams of ASU researchers will lead major projects funded by highly sought-after grants from the U.S. Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program.

More than $150 million will be invested over five years in multidisciplinary projects at 20 universities, including Arizona State University, for science and engineering research considered vital to national defense. ASU joins an elite group of only eight universities to receive more than one MURI award.

Four Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering faculty members will be the lead team for a major aerospace research project. A maximum of $6 million in MURI grant funds will support work to develop more advanced sensor systems to better assess the structural health of aircraft.

And, a team from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, which includes faculty and graduate students, could receive as much as $2.6 million to develop inexpensive lasers based on a new family of silicon-based semiconductors. Enabling silicon to perform optical functions will impact virtually all sensing, security, communication and computing systems, according to the Department of Defense.

The grant recipients were chosen after a rigorous competition. Just one in four of hundreds of initial proposals were approved for a final competition. Then only about one in five of 143 final proposals were selected to receive funding.

Eight teams submitted full proposals for aircraft structural health monitoring and damage prognosis research requested by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Only the project team led by the Fulton School faculty members is being awarded a grant for this engineering research.

Aditi Chattopadhyay, Fulton School professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is the principal investigator.

Her co-principal investigators are associate professors Douglas Cochran, an applied mathematician, Pedro Peralta, a mechanical and aerospace engineer, and Antonia Papandreou-Suppappola, an electrical engineer.

They will work with colleagues at the project’s partner institutions, the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Southern California.

The teams will attempt to improve both the devices and methodologies used to monitor the physical condition of aircraft. Researchers want a clearer picture of everything from the overall structural stability of an aircraft to the effects of wear and tear on the materials of which it’s made – down to a microscopic level.

“The average age of military and civilian aircraft is growing at a fast pace. The average service life of some key Air Force airframes is already more than 25 years, the expected aircraft retirement age is more than 52 years,” Chattopadhyay said. “As aircraft become older and accumulate more flight hours, the tendency to develop fatigue cracking, overload cracking and corrosion increases.”

By improving the accuracy of risk assessment and aircraft life-span estimates, it will help reduce operation and maintenance costs of the current Air Force fleet and produce advancements that can be integrated into new generations of aircraft, she said.
Most importantly, the new methodologies she expects her project team to develop will boost confidence in aircraft safety and greatly reduce the probability of system failures.

The project’s range of objectives and potential impact is extensive.

Researchers will look to develop new sensing instrumentation and experiment with how and where to install such devices on aircraft, Cochran says.

They’ll also work on how to effectively connect various types of sensors into networks “that can essentially talk to each other and work together” to provide a comprehensive and integrated diagnosis of aircraft health, he says.

Beyond that, the team will study ways to more effectively evaluate the information communicated by sensing systems. That will provide a more certain basis for making decisions about how to respond to aircraft damage and deterioration, Cochran says.

Such sensing and data-assessment systems could be adapted and applied to many types of vehicles, particularly ships, as well as buildings and other structures, such as bridges.

The other MURI-funded project is the outgrowth of several years of collaboration between ASU professors José Menéndez, in the physics and astronomy department and John Kouvetakis, in the chemistry and biochemistry department.

“We have been collaborating on this project for a long time,” Kouvetakis says. “The proposed lasers are based entirely on a new family of semiconductors containing silicon, germanium and tin (SiGeSn). These materials were synthesized for the first time three years ago by Matt Bauer, a former ASU chemistry graduate student in our labs.”

“Further development in terms of synthesis and optical properties was conducted primarily by ASU graduate students John Tolle in chemistry and biochemistry and Vijay D’Costa in physics and astronomy,” Kouvetakis says, noting that Tolle is the founder of Si-Photonics, an ASU spinoff, and Bauer now works with Intel Corp.

Their early research was noticed by Intel Corp. and Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts, according to Kouvetakis, which resulted in initial grants that came at an auspicious time.

This new MURI award will allow the researchers to put some of these discoveries into practice, Kouvetakis says.

”These materials promise dramatic cost savings and enhanced performance in infrared lasers, with widespread applications for sensing and communications,” Menéndez says.

Also participating in the original research was Andrew Chizmeshya, an associate research scientist in the Center for Solid State Science who is a co-principal investigator. This core team recruited for this project includes Fernando Ponce, a professor in physics and astronomy, and an expert in semiconductor materials, and Yong-Hang Zhang, a professor in the electrical engineering department at the Fulton School, who has extensive experience in infrared lasers, Kouvetakis says. The ASU team also will collaborate with laser experts at the University of Illinois and the University of Massachusetts.

Both grants are sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The initial MURI award is for a three-year period. Two additional years of funding will be possible, subject to satisfactory research progress and available appropriations.

Carol Hughes, carol.hughes@asu.edu

(480) 965-6375

Joe Kullman, joe.kullman@asu.edu

(480) 965-8122