Department of Materials Science and Engineering

White Building (7204)
Phone: 216.368.4230
Department Chair: Frank Ernst
Frank.Ernst@case.edu


Materials science and engineering is a discipline that extends from understanding the microscopic structure and properties of materials to designing materials in engineering systems and evaluating their performance. Achievements in materials engineering underpin the revolutionary advances in technology that define the modern standard of living. Materials scientists and engineers understand how the properties of materials relate to their microscopic structure and composition and engineer the synthesis and microstructure of materials to advance their performance in conventional and innovative technical applications.

The Department of Materials Science and Engineering of the Case School of Engineering offers programs leading to the degrees of Bachelor of Science in Engineering, Master of Science, and Doctor of Philosophy. The technological challenges that materials engineers face demand knowledge across a broad spectrum of materials. The Department conducts academic and research activities with metals, ceramics, semiconductors, polymers, and composites. Timely research and education respond to the demands for new materials and improved materials performance in existing applications, often transcending the traditional materials categories.

While a discipline of engineering, the field brings basic science to bear on the technological challenges related to the performance of industrial products and their manufacture. Materials science draws on chemistry in its concern for bonding, synthesis, and composition of engineering materials and their chemical interactions with the environment. Physics provides a basis for understanding the atomistic and electronic structure of materials and how they determine mechanical, thermal, optical, magnetic, and electrical properties. Mathematics, computation, and data science provide quantitative physical theories and modeling of the atomistic and electronic structure and provide advances in methods for microstructural analysis, materials design, and manufacturing processes.

Mission

The Department of Materials Science and Engineering engages faculty, students, postdoctoral researchers, engineers, and staff in developing and understanding relationships between processing, structure, properties, and the performance of materials in engineering applications.  The Department provides a research-intensive environment that encourages collaboration and underpins modern education of undergraduate and graduate students as well as professionals in the field. This environment provides a strong foundation for advancing the frontiers of materials research, developing important technical innovations, and preparing engineers and scientists for challenging leadership careers.

Research Areas

Deformation and Fracture

Stress–strain relations during elastic and anelastic deformation. Plastic deformation mechanisms controlled by dislocation activity, twinning, or transformation-induced shear mechanisms, as well as by creep and viscous flow mechanisms under uniaxial, biaxial, and triaxial stress states, in particular in plane-strain and/or plane-stress conditions. Relationships between structure (atomistic structure and microstructure) and mechanical behavior of crystalline and glassy materials, including metals, intermetallics, semiconductors, ceramics, and composites. State-of-the-art facilities are available for testing mechanical properties over a range of strain rates, test temperatures, stress states, and size scales under monotonic and cyclic loading and under stress–corrosion conditions. 

Materials Processing

Phase-transformation- and thermo-mechanical processing of alloys, including solution-, precipitation-, recovery-and-recrystallization- and stress-relief heat-treatments, also for intentional generation of residual-stresses. Deformation processing of materials. Surface engineering, crystal growth, sputter-, vapor- and laser-ablation synthesis of films. Melting and casting of metal alloys into sand/ceramic molds, injection into metallic molds, and by rapid solidification to form crystalline or (metallic-) glass ribbons. Ceramic- and metal powder synthesis. Consolidation processing by cold-pressing and sintering, electric-field-assisted compaction, or hot-pressing. Composite materials by forming of layered materials, electroplated metals, diffusion-bonding, brazing, and welding. Electrochemical- and thermo-chemical conversion processing, e.g. oxide-film growth by anodizing or thermochemical conversion. Synthesis of micro-to-nano-porous metal/oxide structures, e.g. for battery and capacitor electrodes or for catalyst support.

Environmental Effects

Durability and lifetime extension of structural, energy-conversion-, and energy-storage materials, including materials for solar energy conversion. Corrosion, oxidation, stress-corrosion, low- and high-cycle fatigue, adhesion, decohesion, friction, and wear. Surface modification and coatings, adhesion, bonding, and dis-bonding of dissimilar materials, reliability of electronics, photonics, and sensors.

Surfaces and Interfaces

Material surfaces in vacuum, ambient-, and chemical environments, grain- and phase boundaries, hetero-interfaces (interfaces between different metals, ceramics, carbon/graphite, polymers, and combinations thereof). 

Electronic, Magnetic, and Optical Materials

Materials for energy conversion technologies, such as photovoltaics, organic and inorganic light-emitting diodes and displays, fuel cells, electrolytic capacitors, solid-state Li-ion batteries, and building-envelope materials. Processing, properties, and characterization of magnetic, ferroelectric, and piezoelectric materials.

Microcharacterization of Materials

Facilities for high-resolution imaging, spatially resolved chemical analysis and spectrometry, and diffractometry. Conventional, analytical, and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, focused ion beam techniques, scanning probe microscopy, light-optical microscopy, optical and electron spectroscopies, surface analysis, and X-ray diffractometry.

Materials Data Science

Rapid qualification of alloys, data science applications in polymers and coatings. Distributed computing, informatics, statistical analytics, exploratory data analysis, statistical modeling, and prediction.  Hadoop, cloud computing, and computationally intensive research are supported through the operation of a scalable high-performance computing (HPC) system.

Faculty

Frank Ernst, Dr. rer. nat. habil.
(University of Göttingen)
Leonard Case Jr. Professor of Engineering
https://goo.gl/OWsF9K
Microstructure and microcharacterization, alloy surface engineering, defects in crystalline materials, interface- and stress-related phenomena.

Laura S. Bruckman, PhD
(University of South Carolina)
Associate Professor
Materials data science, lifetime and degradation science, study protocol development, spatiotemporal data integration

Jennifer W. Carter, PhD
(The Ohio State University)
Associate Professor
Processing–structure–property relationships of crystalline and amorphous materials. Multi-scale material characterization methods for correlating local microstructural features with mechanical and environmental responses.

Roger H. French, PhD
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Kyocera Professor
Optical properties and electronic structure of polymers, ceramics, optical and biomolecular materials. These determine the vdW interactions which drive wetting of interfaces and mesoscale assembly biomolecular and inorganic systems including CNTs, proteins and DNA. Energy research focused on lifetime and degradation science. Including developing CRADLE, a Hadoop/Hbase/Spark-based distributed computing environment, for data science and analytics of complex systems such as photovoltaics and outdoor exposed materials. This allows multi-factor real-world performance to be integrated with lab-based datasets to identify mechanisms and pathways activated over lifetime using statistical and machine learning.

John J. Lewandowski, PhD
(Carnegie Mellon University)
Arthur P. Armington Professor of Engineering
Mechanical behavior of materials. Fracture and fatigue. Micromechanisms of deformation and fracture. Composite materials. Bulk metallic glasses and composites. Refractory metals. Toughening of brittle materials. High-pressure deformation and fracture studies. Hydrostatic extrusion.

James D. McGuffin-Cawley, PhD
(Case Western Reserve University)
Arthur S. Holden Professor of Engineering
Powder processing of ceramics. Manufacturing and materials. Additive manufacturing and rapid prototyping. Aggregation phenomena. Defects, diffusion, and solid state reactions. Materials for optical devices.

Alp Sehirlioglu, PhD
(University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign)
Associate Professor
Energy conversion materials, including piezoelectrics and thermoelectrics. Bulk and film electro-ceramics. Epitaxial oxide films.

Gerhard E. Welsch, PhD
(Case Western Reserve University)
Professor
High-temperature materials. Materials for capacitive energy storage. Metals, metal sponges, oxides. Mechanical and electrical properties. Synthesis.

Matthew A. Willard, PhD
(Carnegie Mellon University)
Associate Professor
Magnetic materials: properties, microstructure evolution, phase formation, and processing conditions. Rapid solidification processing. Soft magnetic materials. Permanent magnet materials. Magnetic shape memory alloys, magnetocaloric effects, magnetic nanoparticles, and multiferroics.


Research Faculty

Janet L. Gbur, PhD
(Case Western Reserve University)
Research Assistant Professor
Fatigue and fracture of medical materials, mechanical behavior of superelastic Nitinol; development of microscale medical devices for rehabilitation; and flexible circuit fabrication using aerosol jet printing.

Hoda Amani Hamedani, PhD
(Georgia Institute of Technology)
Research Assistant Professor
Nanomaterials synthesis and characterization for electrochemical energy harvesting, conversion (solar cells, fuel cells). Nanostructured platforms for biomedical applications including flexible bioelectronics and implantable microdevices, localized drug delivery, neural interfacing, sensing and in vivo power generation.

Jeffrey Yarus, PhD
(University of South Carolina)
Research Professor
Applications of data science and statistics in materials science, materials engineering, and geology.


Secondary Faculty

Clemens Burda, PhD
Professor
Chemistry

Sunniva Collins, PhD
Associate Professor
Mechanical Engineering

Liming Dai, PhD
Kent Hale Smith Professor
Macromolecular Science and Engineering

Walter Lambrecht, PhD
Professor
Physics

Clare Rimnac, PhD
Professor
Mechanical Engineering

Mohan Sankaran, PhD
Goodrich Professor of Engineering Innovation
Chemical Engineering

Russell Wang, DDS
Associate Professor
Dentistry

Xiong (Bill) Yu, PhD, PE
Professor
Civil Engineering


Adjunct Faculty

Jennifer Braid, PhD
(Colorado School of Mines)
Adjunct Professor
Developing data science and computer vision techniques for PV module and system research

Arnon Chait, PhD
(The Ohio State University)
Adjunct Professor
NASA Lewis Research Center

Mark DeGuire, PhD
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Adjunct Associate Professor

George Fisher, PhD
Adjunct Professor
Ion Vacuum Technologies Corporation

N.J. Henry Holroyd, PhD
(Newcastle University)
Adjunct Professor
Luxfer Gas Cylinders

Jeffrey J. Hoyt, PhD
(University of California, Berkeley)
Adjunct Professor
McMaster University

Jennie S. Hwang, PhD
(Case Western Reserve University)
Adjunct Professor
H-Technologies Group

Peter Lagerlof, PhD
(Case Western Reserve University)
Adjunct Associate Professor

Ina Martin, PhD
(Colorado State University)
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Case Western Reserve University

Farrel Martin, PhD
Adjunct Professor
United States Naval Research Laboratory

David Matthiesen, PhD
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Adjunct Associate Professor

Terence Mitchell, PhD
(University of Cambridge)
Adjunct Professor
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Erik Mueller, PhD
(University of Florida)
Adjunct Assistant Professor

Badri Narayanan, PhD
(The Ohio State University)
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Lincoln Electric

Joe H. Payer, PhD
Adjunct Professor
University of Akron

Timothy Peshek, PhD
(Case Western Reserve University)
Adjunct Assistant Professor
NASA Glenn Research Center

Rudolph Podgornik, PhD
(University of Ljubljana)
Adjunct Professor
University of Ljubljana

Gary Ruff, PhD
(Case Western Reserve University)
Adjunct Professor
Ruff Associates

Ali Sayir, PhD
(Case Western Reserve University)
Adjunct Professor
Air Force Office of Scientific Research

Mohsen Seifi, PhD
(Case Western Reserve University)
Adjunct Assistant Professor
ASTM International


Emeritus Faculty

William A. "Bud" Baeslack III, PhD
(Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Professor
Welding, joining of materials, and titanium and aluminum metallurgy

Mark De Guire, PhD
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Associate Professor
Synthesis and properties of ceramics in bulk and thin-film form, including fuel cell materials, gas sensors, coatings for biomedical applications, photovoltaics, and ferrites. Testing and microstructural characterization of materials for alternative energy applications. High-temperature phase equilibria. Defect chemistry.

Arthur H. Heuer
Professor

Peter Lagerlof, PhD
(Case Western Reserve University)
Associate Professor
Mechanical properties of ceramics and metals. Low-temperature deformation twinning. Light-induced plasticity of semiconductors. Methodology of transmission electron microscopy and diffractometry.

David Matthiesen, PhD
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Associate Professor
Nitride-based ferromagnetic materials. Applied atomistic simulation of materials. Materials for use in wind turbines. Wind resource measurements onshore and offshore. Materials interactions with ice. Bulk crystal growth processing. Process engineering in manufacturing. Heat, mass, and momentum transport.

Pirouz Pirouz
Professor