College of Engineering News • Iowa State University

Engineers study nanodefects suspected of causing early failures of electrical materials

AMES, Iowa – Tiny defects in electrical insulating materials may lead to breakdowns, robbing the power grid and even cell phones of reliability and efficiency. Xiaoli Tan, an Iowa State University professor of materials science and engineering, is working to understand how those nanoscale defects, when subject to extreme electric fields, evolve into material failures. Those …Continue reading “Engineers study nanodefects suspected of causing early failures of electrical materials”

Tan’s lead-free piezoelectrics discovery published in Physical Review Letters

Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Xiaoli Tan’s research to examine the morphotropic phase boundary, or a state of compounds with a coexisting crystalline phase, in lead-free piezoelectrics was recently published in Physical Review Letters (PRL), the world’s foremost physics journal. Tan and graduate students Hanzheng Guo and Cheng Ma, along with MSE Assistant …Continue reading “Tan’s lead-free piezoelectrics discovery published in Physical Review Letters”

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