1200 EECS

Professor Xiaochun Li is the Raytheon Endowed Chair in Manufacturing Engineering in the Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering & Materials Science and Engineering at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the pioneer and global leader in fundamental study, scalable manufacturing, successful commercialization and practical applications of nanotechnology enabled solidification processing.

We all want the future to be better than the present, and many of us would like to be a part of making that happen. Engineering students, researchers, and practitioners are no exception, and are increasingly turning their energies towards "doing good." However, engineering approaches to problem solving generally treat historical, social, and political systems as unrelated to good engineering work.

Despite considerable progress in the scientific understanding of deformation processes, the mechanical properties of engineered materials remain limited to fractions of their theoretical values. One of the persistent barriers impeding new breakthroughs in mechanical property offerings is the problem of scaling. That is, while materials often exhibit near-theoretical properties at the nanoscale, the preservation of these exceptional characteristics in the bulk is a pervasive challenge. In response to this issue, my group focuses on examining deformation processes at the mesoscale.

The field of electronic and photonic biointerfaces continues to evolve, with flexible and living composites playing a key role in advancing the development of multifunctional devices such as sensors and modulators. Our research focuses on creating non-genetic approaches for biological modulation and sensing across different length scales. This presentation will provide insights into some of our recent projects.

Long polymers inevitably entangle, and do not detangle in a crosslinked network. It is known that the network is stiffened by both crosslinks and entanglements. We have recently discovered that crosslinks and entanglements act differently when the network fractures.

In this study, micromechanical experiments are performed in situ during deformation loading on unirradiated and irradiated samples of a model BCC alloy, Fe-9wt.%Cr, via high-energy X-ray diffraction microscopy.

The diversity and complexity of natural substrates—from flowable materials like sand and mud to steeply sloped tree branches and trunks with vast differences in flexibility and roughness—present significant challenges for animal movement.

Vikas will present his team's theoretical framework and a microstructural physics-motivated constitutive model that describes the nonlinear large strain elastic-viscoplastic material response, rate-dependent stiffening and material state transformation of reversible dynamically crosslinked soft polymers over seven decades of strain rates.

Physico-chemical interactions at interfaces are ubiquitous in multiple industries including energy, water, agriculture, medicine, transportation, and consumer products. In this talk, Kripa will summarize how surface/interface chemistry, morphology, thermal, and electrical properties can be engineered across multiple length scales for significant efficiency enhancements in a wide range of processes.

Fluid flows often exhibit chaotic or turbulent dynamics and require a large number of degrees of freedom for accurate simulation. Nevertheless, because of the fast damping of small scales by viscosity, these flows can in principle be characterized with a much smaller number of dimensions, as their long-time dynamics relax in state space to a finite-dimensional invariant manifold.

To create metallic scaffolds or microlattices with sub-millimeter strut architectures, we develop a new method, Extrusion 3D-Printing, consisting of two simple steps. First, metal oxide particle suspensions (inks) are extruded, in air and at ambient temperature, into linear struts creating self-supporting lattices. Second, the oxides are hydrogen-reduced to metal and sintered into dense metallic microlattices.

Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) is a specific ocean CDR approach that can locally reverse ocean acidification and draw additional CO2 from the air into oceanic bicarbonate where it is stored for over10,000 years, mimicking the Earth’s natural mechanism for regulating the atmospheric CO2 concentration. In this talk, I will review the latest results from my group on electrochemical ocean alkalinity enhancement and describe the efforts to commercialize this technology at Ebb Carbon, Inc.