Research interests
Publications
All publications are available here.
General Theme
Our research involves the application of appropriate theoretical and
computational techniques to understand materials systems of
significant experimental interest. This work involves prediction of
new phenomena, explanation of existing data and collaborations with
experimentalists on contemporaneous experiments. It encompasses a variety
of thin film and bulk materials from metals to semiconductors, crystalline
to disordered materials, and nano- to micro- length scales. Varied
theoretical techniques are utilized such as density functional theory
(DFT) based computations, classical molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo
simulations, and continuum analytical equations.
Other phenomena involving large scale statistical information of general
physical systems is another interest. Techniques such as analytical
solutions to linear and non-linear deterministic, stochastic and
differential equations with noise, equations of elasticity, numerical
solutions to algebraic equations are used for this purpose.
Funding Sources
Funding for our group comes from variety of sources including Department of Energy, DARPA, Air Force, NSF, State of Ohio and University of Toledo.
Students
Over a dozen Ph.D. students, 16 M.S. students and 6 undergraduates have
worked on research projects and graduated on to pursue lucrative careers.
Ceramics Database Repository
We have develpoed a community-based, interactive database of crystalline
inorganic materials for high performance coating applications,
funded through the US federal government's Materials Genome Initiative
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/mgi) and the National Science Foundation's
grant on "Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future".
Estimates of available data in the scientific literature for structural,
elastic, mechanical and electronic properties of solids related to
coatings applications maybe conservatively placed in the 100,000
range. To make full use of this vast computational knowledge, this
platform, an open-access community-based ceramics database with an
emphasis on high performance coatings had been created.
Our database handles large amounts of data with features of data selection
tools and rapid search capabilities. It has active display features for
generating a variety of formats of tables and graphs. Users can choose
fields to query corresponding to their computed or experimentally
measured properties of interest in a web-based user-friendly form. The
resulting data can be brought in to a table format of one's choice
and downloaded for further manipulation. Figures with graphs are also
automatically displayed on demand to generate a visual representation
of the dataset of choice. All entries are linked to the original
papers on the web with full citation information through DOI or other
identifiers. Participation and contribution from the coatings community
is sought, encouraged and welcomed. The database is presently already
populated with data from a few hundred materials and is expected to
grow through the community's contributions. Being community-based,
users can become contributors, with the privilege to add/edit/delete
entries from their own contributions. The names and contact information
of the contributors are displayed as an appreciation for their efforts,
and also as a means to enhance peer reviewing. We sincerely hope this
platform can attract the community's attention, usage and contribution,
and fulfill its purpose to serve as an active and essential data hub in
the field of coatings science and technology.
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