This site is designed for accessibility. Content is obtainable and functional to any browser or Internet device. This site's full visual experience is available in a graphical browser that supports web standards. Please consider upgrading your browser.

UTS: Institute for Nanoscale Technology

Nanograined materials have attracted significant scientific and industrial interest in the last few years. Owing to their ultra-fine grain structure, the materials are expected to exhibit much higher strength and ductility, which should open up opportunities for many new applications. For example recent research at UTS demonstrated the successful development of a nano-structured gold with high strength and hardness - a substantial enhancement on the strength of this industrially important conducting metal.

The nanograin materials project at UTS seeks to produce ultra-fine grained materials with novel and useful properties. We have selected prototypical material types from each of the main structural groups, and are investigating improving their properties:

• The metals - copper, gold, aluminium and ultra-fine grain examples (made a process of intensive shear deformation known as equiangular distortion) - are being investigated by Dr Wing Yeung.
• Intermetallic materials - ternary nitride coatings made by vacuum techniques - are primarily led at UTS by Dr Yeung and Dr Richard Wuhrer.
• Nanocrystalline sol-gel coatings are the interest of A/Prof. Besim Ben Nissan, and his research group, while
• nano-structured polymers are being tackled by Dr Cuong Ton-That.

These projects are united by the fact that the ultra-fine grain size of the materials being studied causes unusual and interesting properties. In the last few years, the UTS research team has achieved success in all areas. For example, submicron and nano-grain industrial alloys and high-valued precious metals have been successfully produced by EAE. The processed metals are cold-worked to their maximum hardness, and yet still possess reasonable ductility. Further work on studying the stability of the nanostructures of such materials is being pursued in this project. In respect to the intermetallic compounds, the process parameters necessary to prepare nanocrystalline ternary nitride coatings with a hardness of ~3000 HV have been identified.

The relationship between deposition conditions, grain size and properties are being further studied and analysed, with the aim of optimising conditions for the industrial production of the coatings. A highlight of the work of the researchers in the Sol-Gel Laboratory has been the development of a new process which, when used in conjunction with hydrothermal treatment, converts a coral substrate to a biocompatible hydroxyapatite (HAp) with improved properties. The group has also developed a technique for coating sol-gel produced HAp onto coralline hydroxyapatite for a range of artificial devices including ocular, orthopaedic and maxillofacial implants. The major advantages of this technology include production of highly crystalline HAp with reduced contaminants, optimum pore diameter for ingrowth of host fibrovascular tissue (approximately 150-500 μm), improved strength, the ability to coat a surface of any desired configuration with varying thickness of HAp and greatly reduced production costs.

X-ray diffraction is one of the means to characterise both nanograined and nanoparticulate materials. Prediction of the X-ray diffraction patterns of variously structured materials is being carried out by Dr Nick Armstrong. A particular interest is to discover whether the shape of a nano-particle can be recovered from the shape of the peaks on its diffraction patterns. Dr Armstrong was recently awarded a large research grant by NIST in the USA to pursue aspects of this work.