Features: Feb. 4, 2002

Keblinski Receives CAREER Award

Pawel Keblinski, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation.

The CAREER Award is the NSF's most prestigious honor for faculty members who are at the beginning of their academic careers.

Keblinski, a leader of Rensselaer's nanotechnology modeling team, will use his $300,000 five-year grant to model the effect of interfaces on mechanical properties of polycrystalline diamond.

While gem diamonds are single-crystal, diamond thin films grown by chemical deposition methods are polycrystal, which means they consist of many small crystalline diamond grains separated by interfaces. The strength of bonds between atoms at these interfaces is generally weaker than in the perfect diamond crystal, which causes the material to be more brittle.

"Understanding the role of interfaces on mechanical properties, such as hardness and durability, is essential to designing materials. Because polycrystals are far more common in nature than single crystals, the knowledge derived from our studies of polycrystalline diamond can apply to other brittle materials such as ceramics," said Keblinski. Ceramics are necessary for hard coatings or thermal protection barriers, for example.