MRI: Acquisition of a spark plasma sintering system for engineering advanced materials and composites for use in extreme environments

With this Major Research Instrumentation award, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is acquiring a Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS) facility for advanced material synthesis and consolidation of a wide range of ceramic, metallo-ceramic, and composite powders. This facility enables cutting-edge research serving the College of Arts and Sciences as well as the School of Engineering, and it is available to researchers throughout the state of Alabama.

The materials developed via SPS contribute to key technologies in the aerospace, defense, power generation, and industrial processing industries having significant national, economic, and environmental impact. A major objective is to develop novel materials primarily intended for use in extreme conditions of temperature, pressure, electric/magnetic fields, or harsh chemical environments.

In addition to supporting several established research programs, the award aims to stimulate new research team projects for junior faculty and to foster collaboration across the state and beyond. The SPS facility is available to student and faculty researchers across the university and to other academic and industrial researchers across Alabama, where there is no instrument with its capabilities.

It serves as a focal point of undergraduate/graduate teaching/training within the UAB materials engineering and physics departments leading to enhanced course development in advanced materials fabrication. In addition, the SPS facility is planned for ongoing integration into NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) projects. Community outreach efforts involve partnership with the local science center located in the heart of downtown Birmingham and focus on developing materials exhibits for a broader viewing audience including the general public and K-12 students.

The spark plasma sintering facility features fast and efficient material consolidation (heating or cooling rates up to 1000 °C/min) to aid in the control or prevention of grain growth and ion diffusion. The speed of the process ensures it has the potential of densifying powders with nanosize or nanostructure while avoiding coarsening which accompanies standard densification routes.

The facility satisfies the requirements for fabrication of advanced ceramics, namely combined elevated temperature (up to 3000 °C), pressure (up to 259 kN), and controlled environment (inert gas or vacuum) capability. It also features two pressing ranges in one hydraulic cylinder: a low range from 3 – 28 kN for sintering small samples and a high range from 22 – 259 kN for large geometries.

The facility enables transformative research at UAB in ultrahigh temperature ceramics, superhard materials, high-pressure physics, plasma physics, laser physics, impurities/defects, nonlinear optics, material degradation in corrosive environments, and development of novel composites. These studies are led by an interdisciplinary team of faculty and will result in fundamental understanding in topics related to densification processes in high entropy ceramics and in metal-ceramic composites, oxidation behavior in high-temperature environments, power generation in middle infrared lasers, ultrafast nanophotonics, novel ternary superconducting thin films, and the role of low-temperature plasmas in materials synthesis.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.