Keynote Seminar by Prof. Dayakar Penumadu (Fred N. Peebles Professor, Tickle College of Engineering, University of Tennessee - Knoxville): "Low Cost Carbon Fiber and Polymer Reinforced Composites: Structure-Process-Property Relationship"

Carbon fiber composites have revolutionized aerospace structures for several decades. The Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation, IACMI, is a recently established and the fifth Institute in the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation, supported by the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office. Carbon fibers in composite form are targeted for low cost and high volume applications in wind, automotive, and compressed gas storage application space. Large volume use of composites using carbon fiber has not been realized largely due to cost of raw materials. One of the major costs of carbon fiber is its precursor and ways to reduce the overall cost of the carbon fiber production has been pursued by IACMI using low cost precursors such as textile PolyAcryloNitrile (PAN) or biomass based (lignin). As these new materials evolve, characterization based manufacturing and optimization becomes a key for its rapid success and commercialization. Fiber reinforced polymer composites, especially carbon fiber reinforced materials, offer a number of opportunities to design light weight structures that are fatigue tolerant, corrosion resistant, cost effective, and offer the unique advantage to integrate anisotropy in strength and stiffness to tailor the desired properties in target directions. This talk will introduce the audience to low-cost carbon fiber and composites, which are expected to be game changers for wide adoption in various light-weight engineering applications. A fundamental need in the development of next generation polymer matrix composites is to bridge the gap between characterization and modeling and a personal perspective on multi-scale response will be presented considering carbon fiber composites.

Dayakar Penumadu is the Fred N . Peebles Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He also holds a Joint Institute for Advanced Materials (JIAM) Chair of Excellence, joint with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He has published extensively and has ongoing research support from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Penumadu has received numerous awards for his research, including best technical paper award, the University of Tennessee College of Engineering Research Fellow Award multiple times, CEE department level Outstanding Teacher Award, and most recently, a Chancellors Interdisciplinary Research Award. Dr. Penumadu currently serves as the Co- Principal Investigator at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville for the recently established Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI) with a total project funding of $270 million, one of the five US National Network for Manufacturing Institutes managed by the U.S Department of Energy Advanced Manufacturing Office for the project period of 2015 – 2020. He also serves this institute in a technical role as its Characterization Fellow for the Materials and Processing Directorate. He also currently serves as a Co-Principal Investigator for a recently established Manufacturing and Materials Joining Innovation Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville sponsored by the National Science Foundation Industry University Research Consortium (NSF IUCRC) program. This program is focused on additive manufacturing with an emphasis of developing structurally sound parts/materials for safety critical applications from structure-process-property relationship and multi-scale and multi-physics modeling.