The U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE\/NNSA) has designated four new Centers of Excellence at universities across the nation.\u00a0The NNSA is the agency behind the Nation\u2019s Stockpile Stewardship Mission (SSM), which works to strengthen the US nuclear security enterprise by advancing relevant areas of science and ensuring a robust pipeline of future nuclear scientists.<\/p>\n
Avinash Dongare, associate professor from UConn\u2019s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Institute of Materials Science, will serve as one of the principal investigators for one of these new centers, the Center for Research Excellence on Dynamically Deformed Solids (CREDDS), which has received $12.5 million over five years. The CREDDS center is led by Michael Demkowicz of Texas A&M University and also includes the University of Michigan and the University of California Santa Barbara with Amit Misra, chair of materials science and engineering, and Irene Beyerlein serving as the other principal investigators.<\/p>\n
CREDDS focuses on the science of the metallic materials behind the nation\u2019s nuclear weapons and will explore new materials produced by advanced manufacturing processes. These materials, which can have properties superior to their predecessors, have complex multiphase microstructures that challenge conventional knowledge of how materials change under the conditions associated with nuclear reactions. Of special interest to CREDDS researchers is how the materials deform under very high strain rates, or how quickly the shape of a material changes under extreme conditions.<\/p>\n