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MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
MINING THE GAPS: We recently caught up with the Colorado School of Mines, an active member of the association that is celebrating its 150th year as a leading institution in engineering and scientific fields. The school has also recently added an undergraduate degree program in ceramics.
We spoke with Ivar Reimanis, head of the Metallurgical and Materials Engineering Department; Geoff Brennecka, a professor who directs the Colorado Center for Advanced Ceramics; and Professor Kim Scott, an energy storage engineer.
Why did the university join USACA?
Ivar: We’ve been familiar with USACA for a while, but it was really the process of putting together our new Ceramic Engineering BS degree that convinced us that it was time to join. We worked with a few dozen industrial collaborators as well as our colleagues at Alfred University and Missouri University of Science and Technology to develop the curriculum for our new program, and they kept suggesting that we join, so here we are.
Geoff: The culture at Mines is very application- and industry-focused, so USACA is a natural fit. Across campus, between 30 and 40 percent of the research is industry-sponsored. These connections bring relevance to the classroom and help connect our students with their future employers. They can also lead to collaborative projects where Mines helps industry with their research needs.
Where have you seen the most dynamic changes in advanced ceramics?
Geoff: A lot of the growth in advanced ceramics in recent decades boils down to advances in the raw materials and the processing methods that allow you to have high-purity, high-performance, and high-reliability ceramics. These advancements in fabrication and manufacturing enable the use of flaw-sensitive materials like ceramics, so that we as a community, can take advantage of their suite of properties that you simply can’t get from other materials.
In what areas do you see some of that cutting edge?
Geoff: All of the semiconductor industry is built around ceramics, along with every other kind of material – everything from the resonators and sensors in your cellphone to the processors themselves today, and beyond to emerging non-von Neumann architectures and even systems for quantum computing. They are made from different ceramic materials. Beyond the chips themselves, much of the equipment that is needed to fabricate the chips is also reliant upon advanced ceramic technologies.
Ivar: Structural ceramics and composites have had tremendous advances for applications in the aerospace and defense industries. Mines is also heavily invested in ceramics for energy applications. These three areas in particular are where we have focused our undergrad degree program: electronics, aerospace, and energy. Sensors are another growth area.
Is there a growing focus on the role of ceramics in renewable energy?
Ivar: Our mines energy portfolio is huge. It covers nuclear to renewables to oil and gas, the whole spectrum. There is a lot of work on reuse and recycling. Mines was founded to improve methods to get gold and silver from ore. Now a big focus is to extract critical minerals used in renewable energy from waste, including things like battery recycling.
Kim: Most people don't realize how many of the components in each of our devices – whether it be solar cell to a lithium-ion battery to components that you would have for nuclear power – all involve ceramics.
We are looking at better ways to utilize some of our existing materials. For example, when you look at the electrode materials in lithium-ion batteries, they are ceramic based. There's still so much work that needs to be done to find better ways to get the amount of energy that we need or achieve less weight and different configurations.
In the lithium-ion battery industry, recycling is now a major focus. How do we extract some of the different minerals and materials so that we can actually utilize that?
Our students learning in depth in ceramics have a better understanding of how all those devices work and the ways we can make advancements.
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