Assistant Professor Atieh Moridi Selected for NSF CAREER Award

Atieh Moridi, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, was selected for the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award.

According to NSF, the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is its most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Moridi’s research interests lie in the areas of advanced materials and manufacturing. She exploits the intrinsic properties as well as flexibility of additive manufacturing to synthesize novel high-performance materials. 

Additive manufacturing of metallic materials, also known as 3D printing, has seen tremendous growth recently. The unique capabilities of metal additive manufacturing have the potential to transform production, particularly in the fields of aerospace, automotive, defense, and medicine.

With the new NSF grant provided by the NSF CAREER Award, Moridi and her group will use time-resolved X-ray diffraction and imaging techniques at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) for a detailed study of the powder fed, Direct Energy Deposition (DED) process. In this process, parts are created by melting and fusing powder particles that are fed into the path of a laser heat source. 

Moridi Group at CHESS

 

Moridi’s goal is to overcome long-lasting limitations of additive manufacturing through understanding the dynamics of the DED process by looking below the surface of the material.  Specifically, they aim to characterize the dynamic phenomena that often leads to unwanted phase transformations and grain structures, residual stresses, and porosities caused by the extreme heating and cooling rates during additive manufacturing.

The combination of the time-resolved X-ray diffraction and X-ray imaging is a powerful technique to understand the fundamental physics of phase transformation, particle flow, fluid flow, and heat transfer in additive manufacturing. To enable these experiments, the Moridi Group designed a custom-built DED system that closely mimics the physics of the process.

Prior to joining the faculty of the Sibley School in 2019, Moridi was a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. from Politecnico di Milano, Italy where she was awarded Ph.D. Cum Laude, the highest institute honors.

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