Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering Calendar

*Presentation will be recorded.

Abstract: 

Ceramics offer high strength, exceptional hardness, and excellent thermal stability, making them well suited for extreme thermal and mechanical environments such as those encountered in hypersonic flight and deep-space exploration. Conventional processing routes that date back thousands of years, such as bulk casting followed by high-temperature firing, often produce ceramics that are brittle and highly sensitive to flaws or defects, significantly limiting their mechanical resilience under demanding conditions. 

The advent of additive manufacturing (AM) and artificial intelligence (AI) offers a potential paradigm shift for the design and manufacturing of ceramic materials. By enabling voxel-by-voxel fabrication, these approaches allow spatial engineering of ceramic microstructures across meso-, micro-, and down to the crystallographic scale, fundamentally reshaping how ceramics respond to stress waves and high thermal gradients. However, most efforts to date have focused on macroscale architectures, while microstructural design and control remain underexplored, largely due to the high processing temperatures in conventional ceramic AM that hinder the retention of locally engineered features. In this talk, I will present our recent work on the development and modeling of novel ceramic AM processes, with a particular focus on an ultra-low-temperature ceramic AM process termed hydrothermal jet fusion (HJF). Inspired by natural rock formation occurring under ambient conditions, HJF enables the integration of ceramic materials with dissimilar materials, opening new pathways for fabricating compositionally and structurally complex ceramic systems. Building on these advances, I will further discuss how data- and AI-driven approaches can be leveraged to systematically design and precisely tailor ceramic microstructures to achieve targeted end-use performance requirements.

Bio: 

Dr. Xuan Song is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Iowa. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2016. Dr. Song’s research focuses on the design, manufacturing, and diagnostics of extreme materials, particularly ceramics and composites, that operate under harsh thermal and mechanical conditions. His research aims to advance next-generation additive manufacturing systems with embedded intelligence for multiscale tunability and real-time adaptability. His group develops novel additive manufacturing processes and employs multiscale in situ experimental tools, including high-speed optical imaging and high-speed spectroscopy, to probe material dynamics during processing and under operando conditions. Dr. Song is the recipient of the SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award (2022), the NSF CAREER Award (2023), and the AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award (2024). He has also been recognized in multiple years on the University of Iowa Provost’s List for faculty and staff who have made a positive difference in students’ lives.