Grainger VIP Impact Report

GRAINGER PROFESSORSHIP IN ENGINEERING FUND #1

KUMAR SRIDHARAN MS’84, PHD’89 Professor Departments of Engineering Physics and Materials Science & Engineering I would like to express my deep gratitude to The Grainger Foundation for honoring me with the Grainger professorship starting in July 2022. I view this professorship as among the most significant highlights of my career. Being associated with a name so synonymous with engineering globally has elevated my professional recognition in this field. During the academic year, I continued to expand my research in solid-state manufacturing, particularly in the development of the process, field-assisted sintering technology (FAST). In FAST, powder particles of material are consolidated under pressure at high temperatures in the presence of an electrical field to manufacture fully dense parts. The flexible Grainger professorship allowed me to advance this technology in two critical directions. First, my group successfully joined stainless steel to nickel based superalloys seamlessly to create multi-materials with potential for applications in the nuclear energy sector. Second, we mechanically alloyed carbon and stainless steel powders by ball-milling and then with FAST, created a stainless steel-like material but with nearly twice the strength. Manuscripts based on these two new research areas are under preparation for publication in scientific journals, and we anticipate that they will be published by the end of 2024. My group has considerable national recognition in cold spray technology, another low-temperature, solid-state coating technology. I have used funds from the Grainger professorship to develop nickel + metal carbide powder– based, corrosion-resistant composite cold spray coatings for structural components of the molten salt reactor, the next generation nuclear reactor. The Grainger professorship provided partial funds for the purchase of advanced Thermo-Calc software (with

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