The advent of synthetic adhesives has transformed the structural applications of wood. However, a persistent issue in adhesively-bonded wood products has been moisture durability. When designing wood based composites, moisture durability will depend on both the wood phase and the adhesive phase. A key question, therefore, is how does one...
Dimensional stability of wood-based composites with changing moisture content remains an important challenge in the industry for many applications. Wood modification technologies have shown significant improvement in dimensional stability by altering the chemistry of the wood substrate, or by filling the available space in the wood microstructure that otherwise would...
The ability of white and brown rot fungi to colonize wood-plastic composites was investigated by measuring weight loss and anatomical changes. Three composite materials were evaluated. The material containing a 70/30 wood-high density polyethylene (HDPE) mixture was most susceptible to fungal attack, while two different 50/50 wood-HDPE composites experienced little...
The strength-normalized fatigue endurance strength of the bulk metallic glass (BMG) Zr₅₂.₅Cu₁₇.₉Ni₁₄.₆Al₁₀Ti₅ (Vitreloy 105) has been reported to be the highest for any BMG; however, to date, there has been no explanation of why this material is so much better than other Zr-based compositions. In this study, the fatigue-crack growth...
Uses for materials with a large surface area and high porosity have grown sig-nificantly in recent years. Porous materials have found usage in applications such as separation, gas storage, sensing, purification and more, prompting researchers to find and discover numerous new porous materials to suit a specific purpose. Hundreds of...
Menstrual health and hygiene insecurity is a global health issue people across the world face, particularly in developing countries. According to the World Bank, an estimated 500 million lack access to adequate menstrual products, and “to effectively manage their menstruation, women and girls require access to water, sanitation, and hygiene...
Engineering capstone projects are intended as a bridge from school to professional practice in which students work in teams to use learned knowledge and skills to complete real-world engineering projects. However, while the majority of time in many undergraduate programs is devoted to development of technical knowledge and skills, there...
Limbless organisms like snakes can navigate nearly all terrain. In particular, desert-dwelling sidewinder rattlesnakes (C. cerastes) operate effectively on inclined granular media (like sand dunes) that induce failure in field-tested limbless robots through slipping and pitching. Our laboratory experiments reveal that as granular incline angle increases, sidewinder rattlesnakes increase the...
The United States Department of Energy has identified the pebble-bed reactor as a high priority for US research with the end goal of licensing a pebble-bed reactor (PBR) for operation in the United States. Before this can be accomplished significant research must be done regarding the safety of the pebble-bed...