Composite materials student’s research honored, new student organization established

Graduate students who are studying aerospace materials with Jeff Baur successfully participated in several research events this spring.

At the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering International conference in Seattle, students expanded their technical knowledge and professional development with a series of well-received technical presentations, composite competitions, and professional panels. Ivan Wu won 2^nd place in the Best Paper award.

The title of his paper is "Enabling In-Space Manufacturing of Reactive Thermoset Composite via Flexible Containment."

About the work, Wu said “With the goal of enabling large space structures that are not feasible through deployment alone, we are moving the paradigm toward an approach of in-space manufacturing. In this work, we focus on low energy manufacturing of lightweight carbon fiber composite tubes through reactive resin chemistry. However, when we manufacture in space, there are challenges that have not been typically considered in normal Earth conditions. For example, problems such as material long-term storage to satisfy delivery to launch mission timelines or the reactive liquid resin material that vaporizes under vacuum environment.

“To tackle such challenges, we came up with a scalable and flexible approach of containment that not only prolongs the storage-life of the stock material through elimination of oxidation of the material with the environment during storage but also prevents the vaporized volatiles from escaping.

“By using such strategy, we demonstrated in this work longer than six months storage of reactive resin wetted fibers that can then be manufactured into high quality aerospace-grade composite under vacuum environments and with low energy thermal inputs."

Representatives from two composite bridge teams from Baur’s composites manufacturing course, Amanda Yaklin and Joey Tindall, competed in an on-site competition where  bridges are loaded to failure and awarded points for the lightest weight structure to meet the target load. While the relatively new entries from Illinois faced stiff competition from teams who have been participating for decades, it was a successful experience in integrating design, fabrication, and testing knowledge of composite materials into a hands experience.  

As highlighted in a story by the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Morgan Scott, BS ’25 in aerospace, who is now in graduate school in materials science at Illinois, used the meeting to increase her professional network and perspective.

At a Midwest Regional SAMPE Student Research Symposium in Dayton, Ohio aerospace graduate students Joey Tindall, Jason Moon, Ivan Wu and Asim Shahzad earned monetary awards for their outstanding presentations:

Meanwhile, on campus and because of the interest and enthusiasm in the field of advance composite materials manufacturing, a new Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering student chapter has been established at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Morgan Scott, BS ’25, was recently elected president in place of outgoing president Ivan Wu.  Students interested in joining can visit the group's Instagram page.