Steven Naleway
University of Utah, UT·Materials Science
Porous materials, solids threaded with holes, are wanted for bone implants, batteries, semiconductors and lightweight high-strength composites, and the arrangement of those holes largely determines how the material behaves. Two lines of work here approach porous structure from opposite ends: one engineers it from scratch by steering ice crystals with applied fields, and the other reverse-engineers it from fungi, which build strong porous structures biologically.
- Fields
Materials Science
Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
freeze casting
ice templating
porous materials
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Characterize how electrical, magnetic and ultrasound fields applied simultaneously during freeze casting shape pore microstructure, using a factorial experimental study with microstructural imaging and physical property measurements.
- Develop a constitutive theory of Mixed-Energized Field freeze casting from the underlying physics of each field, and use it to predict final structure and identify field parameters that yield the most favorable material properties.
- Determine the structures responsible for the mechanical properties of filamentous fungi from hyphae, their thread-like cellular building blocks, up to mushroom fruiting bodies, comparing specimens harvested in the wild with those cultured in vitro.
- Link fungal structure to mechanical behavior by combining electron microscopy, micro-computed tomography and focused ion beam sectioning with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and thermogravimetric analysis, then derive the governing constitutive biomechanical equations.
More about the research
Both pair hands-on experiments and microscopy with mathematical theory that links structure to mechanical and physical properties.
Why it matters
Designers of bone scaffolds, battery electrodes and lightweight composites currently tune porous structure largely by trial and error. A predictive theory for how electrical, magnetic and ultrasound fields shape freeze-cast pores would let specific microstructures and properties be specified in advance, and should carry over to other slurry-based manufacturing. Quantifying what makes fungal tissue strong gives companies and researchers developing fungi-based packaging, textiles and filters the mechanical design rules they currently lack.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
University of Utah: 58 labs on PI Pages, $789M a year on research, 366 research doctorates a year.
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