Glass Plasticity at Room Temperature

Aim of the project is to transform the current engineering design paradigm of ceramic and glass materials. The key objective of Dr.Erkka J. Frankberg (PI) is to discover ultra-high strength inorganic glass materials that can deform plastically at room temperature. Glass and ceramic materials such as oxides, carbides and nitrides have unique functional properties due to their complicated but easy to tune microstructural properties. They allow a wide range of tailored functional properties from full dielectrics to tuned semiconductors coupled with visible light transparency, and good chemical and thermal stability.  However, the brittle nature of glasses and ceramics at low temperature severely limits their flexible use in engineering, and hence increasing their toughness has been one of the primary goals of materials science for decades.