Today advances in automotive, aerospace, building, defense and energy industries demand new composites and materials with superior combinations of light weight, high performance, affordability, and versatility. This promotes the development of functional nanomaterials which integrate at least one other function beyond the mechanical aspect. Functional nanocomposites can be designed by integrating thermal, electrical, magnetic, optical, mechanical and possibly other functionalities to provide a unique combination of the individual capabilities. Engineered functional nanocomposites have been proposed to improve the dispersion and increase the volume fraction of reinforcing phases over conventional composites. The functional nanocomposites exhibit unique functionalities with a wide range of potential application which is the focus of this lecture.
BIOGRAPHY:
Professor KM Liew is currently a Chair Professor of Civil Engineering. He was the Head of Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering from 2011 to 2017 for six years at City University of Hong Kong, a tenured Full Professor at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), and the Founding Director of Nanyang Center for Supercomputing and Visualization. Over his academic career, he has published over 700 SCI journal articles. Professor Liew is listed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) as a Highly Cited Researcher in Engineering. His publications have been cited over twenty-eight thousand times and his current h-index is 70 (ISI) or 83 (Google Scholar). To date, Professor Liew has attracted over US$45 million research and development funds from government funding agencies, industries and higher institutions. He has graduated over 50 PhD students and supervised over 70 Post-doc fellows. His students are well received by industries and many of them have become faculty members of universities worldwide.