Dr. Hendrik Heinz, a University of Akron associate professor of polymer engineering, and partners from six other universities have been awarded a $7.5 million grant from the Department of Defense (DOD) to study corrosion of materials.
Heinz will receive nearly $1 million over 5 years for his part in the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant from the Office of Naval Research.
Heinz specializes in computer simulations of next-generation materials from the nanoscale to the microscale.
Corrosion is the deterioration of a material, usually a metal, and/or its properties due to chemical reactions with the environment. It affects the longevity in applications ranging from gas transmission pipelines to aircraft and warships. The total cost of corrosion in the United States was $276 billion in 1998, about 3.15 percent of GDP. In 2010, the DOD estimated that corrosion costs the military over $23 billion annually, and an October 2009 study estimated that corrosion is responsible for up to 16 percent of the unavailability of equipment.
Heinz will work with investigators from Northwestern University (team lead), the University of California-Los Angeles, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Virginia to study high temperature and aqueous corrosion processes from the atomic scale to the macroscale. A comprehensive experimental and theoretical attack on the details will enable the team to understand what matters, what does not, and lay the basis for a paradigm shift in improvements of corrosion-resistant materials.
Heinz’s research involves the use of advanced computational tools to simulate the molecular behavior at surfaces and interfaces and to model the properties of solar cells, nanocomposites and conductive composite materials. In addition to the MURI support, Heinz also has research grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research for a collaboration with the Georgia Tech on the rational design of carbon nanofibers used in lightweight materials for air and space vehicles and from the Materials Genome Initiative of the National Science Foundation for an integrated efforts toward the development of ultra-small platinum alloy catalysts to improve the efficiency of fuel cells, mobile power generation, and automotive catalytic converters.
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Media contact: Denise Henry, 330-972-6477 or henryd@uakron.edu.
Dr. Hendrik Heinz