Ranajay Ghosh
University of Central Florida, FL·Engineering·Early-career
Many useful materials and structures get their abilities from how their parts are arranged and how they interact. This research looks at two such systems.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
ceramic additive manufacturing
3D printing
salt binders
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Test whether concentrated salt solutions give green strength to oxide and nitride ceramic powder beds through ion transport and particle bridging during wetting and drying, using mechanical testing, microscopy and x-ray imaging.
- Determine whether molten-salt-assisted sintering makes ceramic densification less sensitive to powder chemistry and particle shape, by tracking shrinkage and microstructure with x-ray diffraction and spectroscopy.
- Scale salt-bound ceramics from simple pellets to layered and overhanging printed shapes, measuring layer adhesion and dimensional retention, and build multiscale transport and electrostatic models to find robust processing windows.
- Test whether rigid scales on soft substrates show universal kinematic locking (stiffening to a rigid state) across geometries and deformation modes, using geometrically exact nonlinear elasticity models.
- Identify emergent behaviors in scale-covered exoskeleton structures, such as chirality, anisotropy and localized locking, using multiscale finite element models with homogenization validated by 3D digital image correlation experiments.
More about the research
One is ceramic parts made by 3D printing. The other is flexible structures covered in rigid scales, modeled on animal exoskeletons. Both projects combine experiments with mechanics-based computer models to connect how something is made or built to how it behaves.
Why it matters
Salt-based binders could make ceramic 3D printing cheaper and more flexible about which powders can be used, including industrial byproducts and waste streams. This could lower the cost of filters, heat exchangers, molds and thermal management parts and strengthen domestic supply chains. Understanding scale-covered exoskeleton structures could guide designs for human-integrated robotics, inspection of aging infrastructure and injury rehabilitation devices.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Benxin Wu
Purdue University, IN·Materials Science
Synthesize base metal and carbon nanotube-metal matrix composite specimens using laser-based additive manufacturing and characterize their mechanical properties under quasi-static, slow loading as a baseline for comparison.
Heng Zuo
University of New Mexico, NM·Engineering·Early-career
Determine how ultrafast laser energy deposition, thermal confinement, chemical transformation, and stress development combine to convert preceramic polymers into polymer-derived ceramics.
Yue Zhou
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach, FL·Engineering
Measure how directed energy deposition settings affect both short-range clustering and overall 3D uniformity of micro-scale ceramic particles in printed metal matrix composites, using controlled experiments and advanced characterization.
The school
University of Central Florida: 15 labs on PI Pages, $285M a year on research, 290 research doctorates a year.
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