Elijah Thimsen, assistant professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, is part of a team working on a project under the U.S. Department of Defense’s highly competitive Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative Program (MURI) Award.
The team received $6.4 million over five years for research investigating how to use dusty plasma, or plasma in which particles are suspended, to make new materials.
They will study how to build on what is known about making powders to determine how to make solids, such as ultra-hard and tough ceramics. Researchers are using a low-temperature plasma, which is a highly non-equilibrium environment that can provide access to unique and potentially useful states of matter.
Read about other faculty members who are working on MURI collaborations.