Project Grant 1660214

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) provides $399,915 in funding to the University of California, Davis from April 1, 2025 to March 31, 2028. The goal of this research is to develop a novel scientific formulation that integrates fracture mechanics with an enriched frame element formulation, resulting in a method that can accurately simulate the initiation and propagation of fracture and fatigue in steel structures. This research...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) project grant award of $200,000 to the University of Missouri System (Missouri S&T) will support research on a novel repair technique to restore the strength and stability of buckled cold-formed steel structural components after seismic events. The two-year project will develop a science-based analytical model to predict the cyclic performance of repaired cold-formed steel members reinforced with basalt fiber-reinforced...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation provides $100,000 to William Marsh Rice University to develop a strain-sensing smart skin technology using carbon nanotubes. The technology is intended to enable non-contact, laser-based strain measurement with advantages over existing digital image correlation methods. It has applications in infrastructure maintenance and safety inspections across industries such as aerospace, bridges, pipelines, wind turbines. Successful development...

This Project Grant, awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Directorate (CFDA 47.041), aims to develop a deeper understanding of fracture and damage tolerance in micro-architectured materials composed of brittle ceramic or ceramic-like parent materials. The $500,000 award to the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (Tees), a division of the Texas A&M University System, will facilitate damage tolerance and structural integrity analysis to enable the reliable use...

This $384,930 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Integrative Activities program (CFDA 47.083) supports the acquisition of a drop tower impact test capability at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. The drop tower will allow researchers to study rate-dependent fracture behavior across a variety of materials, from metals and polymers to composites, under controlled high-speed impact conditions. It will complement existing test techniques and enable undergraduate research,...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Integrative Activities program (CFDA 47.083) provides $299,431 to the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) to develop characterization techniques for determining the rate and temperature-dependent properties of polymer matrix composite (PMC) materials. The goal is to enable accurate simulations of PMC behavior under dynamic loading conditions, such as vehicle crashes and aircraft impacts, to support the widespread...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Office of Integrative Activities provides $586,231 to Arkansas State University to acquire a nanoindenter for materials science and biomaterials research under the Integrative Activities federal grant program (CFDA 47.083). The nanoindenter will enable quantitative mechanical characterization of engineering, construction, and biological materials through measurement of elastic modulus, hardness, deformation, wear, fatigue...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering (CFDA 47.041) Project Grant award supports fundamental research into the puncture mechanics of soft solids, such as hydrogels and biological tissues. The $546,068 award to Georgia Tech Research Corporation, a non-profit research organization and state institution of higher education, will fund a 3-year study to provide a quantitative understanding of the fracture and penetration properties of ultra-soft materials. The research aims to develop...

This collaborative research project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049), was awarded to Auburn University on October 1, 2025, with a total obligation of $155,215.00 and a completion date of September 30, 2029. The project delivers foundational research and development of a transformative framework for metastability engineering in refractory multi-principal element alloys (RMPEAs), aimed at producing structural alloys...

This $599,998 federal Project Grant award from the Department of Defense (CFDA 12.431 - Basic Scientific Research) supports research at Boise State University and Purdue University to understand how irradiation induces unusual amorphous-to-crystalline phase transformations in structural ceramics and their associated mechanical resilience. The primary work under this 3-year award involves molecular dynamics simulations at Purdue to model the crystalline phase nucleation process and internal...