Nanomaterials strengthened and tailored for superiority

Dr Kasra Momeni, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Advanced Hierarchical Materials by Design Lab at Louisiana Tech, in collaboration with researchers from Wright State University and the University of Göttingen in Germany, have revealed a new path for engineering nanomaterials and tailoring their characteristics.

This additional dimension added to the material design is claimed to facilitate the build of superior materials by engineering their atomic structure.

According to Louisiana Tech, the proposed approach can also be used to adjust the chemistry of the material, which is of importance for designing new catalytic materials enhancing the chemical processes.

"Stacking faults in nanomaterials drastically change the stress distribution, as the long-range stress fields interact with the boundaries in these materials," Momeni said in a statement. "The complex nature of the stresses formed in nanowires, as a result of superposition of the stress fields from surface relaxation and reconstruction as well as the stacking fault stress fields, changes the failure mechanism of the nanowires."