Imparting a Dominant Grain Orientation Texture!
A rolling-extended fabrication procedure has been developed for imparting a dominant basal plane grain orientation texture on spark plasma sintered tungsten carbide-cobalt composites.
Biomimicking Snake Scales for Wear Resistant Surfaces!
Property and topology gradients of scaled reptilian skin (Arizona Elegans) were investigated to serve as a biomimetic analogue for material system optimization targeting wear resistance.
Interactions Between Wear Mechanisms!
Interactions between wear mechanisms in a WC-Co / Ti-6Al-4V tribosystem were identified, and the fundamental physicochemical material interaction was confirmed through tribometry.
Design of a Tribometer for Rock Drilling Studies!
Tribometer components were designed and retrofitted onto a CNC lathe and instrumented for real-time force DAQ and used to monitor friction of PDC tooling drilling rock samples.
Tribology - To Roll or Slide, or to Stick or Slip?
6th grade girls from the local community try out their new found knowledge of friction at the lab, as part of an "Expanding Your Horizons" outreach workshop for generating early STEM interest.
Biomimetic Tribology!
About 60 middle school girls participated in the "Expanding Your Horizons" outreach workshop at the lab and got a chance to interact and interview female role models in engineering.
Enhancing the Haptics for Virtual Reality of Minimally Invasive Surgery!
Tackling one of the NAE Grand Challenges to enhance VR, this project improved the haptic perception of surgical simulations through a novel device design and psychophysical studies.
Chip Morphology Effects on Surface Roughness!
Correlations were obtained between Ti-6Al-4V chip morphology parameters and machining productivity metrics such as surface roughness and cutting forces, as well as spindle power/MRR.
Outstanding Young Alumni Award, Clemson University!
Dr. K is selected as one of the three outstanding young alumni from Clemson University's College of Engineering & Science in 2014.
Welcome to MGBTL!
HOWDY!
Welcome to the Manufacturing-, Geo- & Bioinspired-Tribology Lab (MGBTL) website. This is the web portal of the research group of Dr. Mathew Kuttolamadom (Dr. K). We are located at the 5,200 acre flagship campus of Texas A&M University (TAMU) in College Station, TX. TAMU is a land, sea, and space grant public institution which is the 6th largest university in the United States, and ranks among the nation's top 20 tier-1 research institutions.
The overarching research focus of our group is to elucidate the fundamental nature of friction and wear in harsh tribosystems in order to enable durable and resilient material interfaces/surfaces. Of particular interest is the design and manufacture of bioinspired functionally-graded material systems so as to tailor their concurrent intended function and degradation, and to forensically map their surface tribological and sub-surface structural responses to thermomechanical input stimuli. Application areas span the manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, defense, healthcare, pharmaceutical and energy industries, as well as for Oil & Gas bit-rock interaction studies.
In this regard, we draw our inspirations from nature and attempt to emulate and re-engineer her innovative strategies for sustainable solutions, and thus strive to advance the bioinspired-intersection of manufacturing, materials and tribology.
Lab News:
- Elsevier book chapter on 3D printing for personalized medicine has been published (Link) [11/19]
- Congrats to Yash Parikh for completing his internship at ORNL-MDF, & profiled by TAMU (Link) [10/19]
- Congrats to the NSF-REU, RET & ITEST cohorts for completing & presenting their projects (Link) [8/19]
- Journal article on SLS 3D printing of pharmaceuticals published in the Int. J. Pharm. (Link) [8/19]
- Awarded an NSF-ATE grant ($480K) for educating the workforce in Smart Manufacturing (Link) [7/19]
We would like to acknowledge the following sponsors for supporting our work
