Texas Tech is leading the way in nanoscale research engineering. Researchers titled the McKenna Group have recently developed a method for indicating the surface properties of certain materials at temperatures on the smallest of scales, nanoscale.

Leading the team of researchers was Greg McKenna, a professor of chemical engineering and the John R. Bradford Endowed Chair in Engineering.

Knowing the properties of materials at particular temperatures is important to engineers and in engineering, he said.

If an engineer does not take the properties at different temperatures into account it can lead to major disasters in the work field. An example often used for this is the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster, in which case the rubber O-ring failed, leading to the death of seven astronauts.

As technology advances machines get smaller and knowing characteristics of the technologies can make a huge engineering difference, he said.

The problem is known properties of a material can drastically change at the nanoscale, McKenna said.

The nanoscale, he said, is about 1/1,000 of the diameter of a humans hair follicle.

The nanoscale is a funny range of sizes where materials have properties that are not what we expect, even at a step up at the microscale, he said. We are developing methods to characterize surface properties and relate them to nanoscale behavior using a nanoindenter and other nano-mechanical measurement methods.

McKenna and his group have looked at many polymers and explosive materials to see exactly how surface properties varied on the nanoscale, he said, and how the surface impacts the properties on the scale.

Nanoindentation allows researchers such as McKenna to investigate how materials spring back when pushed and how the materials flows, McKenna said.

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University leads others in nanoscale engineering research