Enhancing Material Testing and Characterization by the Long Beach Engineering Center
Abstract
Material testing and characterization is a core discipline for virtually all aspects of engineering. Hands-on training is critical with current, industry-standard, instrumentation. This is necessary for ensuring a strong workforce and providing these opportunities to students especially the nearly 100,000 largely underrepresented minorities applying to CSU Long Beach. Providing this practical training and advancement towards a STEM-based career is the foundation of the Long Beach Engineering Center. We aim to acquire a SEM for use across a wide-range of material characterization instructional and research activities to deliver the hands-on direct training with students both in the class and for their culminating theses and projects. With the SEM and options we have selected, this group of faculty aims to examine polymers, composites, metals, ceramics, bio-materials, and fluids, where each faculty specializes in one of the areas as part of their normal course delivery and research areas. For example, the low vacuum mode enables the imaging of non-conductive polymer-based composites (PI Whisler and co-PI Morales-Ponce) and solid wastes (Co-PIs Haddad & Asvapathanagul), the EDS/EBSD enables the chemical and crystallographical characterizations for novel metallic materials (co-PI Yu) and biological/natural materials (Co-PI Asvapathanagul); both low-vacuum and secondary electron (SE) operated in low voltage coupled with the low-vacuum EDS with high voltage enables imaging sample morphology and chemical analysis of the multiphase fluid (co-PI Madadi). By having a machine capable of detailed imaging across a wide range of materials, we in the College of Engineering will finally be to provide the characterization tools to augment our strong material testing capabilities. This will be the first SEM in the College and will directly impact 4 different disciplines of engineering and nearly 4,000 engineering students, many of whom are underrepresented at our HSI/MSI with more to follow as we update our course curriculum to take advantage of the new capabilities.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 02, 2022
- Source ID
- W911NF2210137
Entities
People
- Daniel Whisler
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- California State University
- Office of the Secretary of Defense