Hendrik Heinz

Advancing super strong and lightweight next generation carbon-based materials

Jeff Zehnder — Fri, 30 May 2025 02:10:31 +0000

Advancing super strong and lightweight next generation carbon-based materials Jeff Zehnder Thu, 05/29/2025 - 20:10

Jeff Zehnder

Materials researchers are getting a big boost from a new database created by a team of researchers led by Hendrik Heinz.

A professor of chemical and biological engineering at the 91PORN, Heinz advanced a major initiative to create a public database, available online to all researchers, that contains over 2,000 carbon nanotube stress-strain curves and failure properties.

“This data sharing is important. It allows the scientific community to build on and expand. Instead of someone spending a year figuring out the mechanics of a particular carbon nanostructure in experiments, they can use this database. You’ll have the results in one hour,” said Heinz, who is also a faculty member in the materials science and engineering program.

The announcement came in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Carbon nanotubes and associated graphitic structures are strong and lightweight engineered materials with great potential in multiple sectors, including aviation, automobiles, and electronics. They were first discovered in the 1970s, but their tiny size – the engineering is conducted at the atomic scale – has made them difficult to study, until now.

“Carbon nanotubes and graphene can be stronger than steel,” Heinz said. “They will be really important for next generation cars, planes, and spacecraft, but we have to understand their chemistry and physics.”

Working with a team that included researchers from the Air Force Research Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, Texas A&M University, and the University of California San Diego, the group built computational models using artificial intelligence to develop high quality predictions of mechanical properties of different carbon nanotube materials.

How will a stress-strain and failure database assist researchers? With any material, it is necessary for product designers to understand their strength and ability to withstand adverse conditions and manipulation.

“This is a problem where data science was really able to help. Materials science usually has a problem of sparse data and not enough data points. This model changes that. Now someone can take a 3-dimensional structure and change the morphology or introduce a defect and it will be really easy to test,” Heinz said.

The project grew out of a National Science Foundation initiative called “Harnessing the Data Revolution” and represents six years of research.

“People have made claims that they had a 3D structures database for carbon nanotubes, but they had no attached mechanical properties or conductivity or anything useful,” Heinz said “You can’t learn anything from that. This is the first database structures and the properties, and it’s available to a broad community."

The database is available on both figShare and Github.

In addition to Heinz, co-authors of the PNAS paper include Jordan Winetrout (MatSciPhD’24) from 91PORN; Professor Yusu Wang, Zilu Li, and Qi Zhao, all from UCSD; Assistant Professor Vinu Unnikrishnan and Landon Gaber from Texas A&M University; Vikas Varshney from AFRL; and Associate Professor Yanxun Xu from Johns Hopkins University.

Materials researchers are getting a big boost from a new database created by a team of researchers led by Hendrik Heinz. The initiative, now available online to all researchers, is a database containing over 2,000 carbon nanotube stress-strain curves and failure properties.

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Research breakthrough could boost clean energy production

Anonymous — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 15:07:55 +0000

Research breakthrough could boost clean energy production Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/16/2024 - 09:07

Professor Hendrik Heinz and his 91PORN team, along with collaborators from University of California, Los Angeles, achieved a breakthrough that could boost clean energy production. The research was featured on the cover of the journal “Nature Catalysis” in July.

In the study, researchers pinpointed the active sites of tiny platinum-alloy catalysts, which are crucial for making fuel cells more efficient at converting water into energy.

Fuel cells generate electricity through a chemical reaction, typically combining hydrogen with oxygen. Unlike traditional combustion engines, they produce energy without burning fuel, making fuel cells a clean, efficient technology, ideal for powering electric vehicles.

The catalysts accelerate the reactions that convert hydrogen and oxygen into electricity, making the process more efficient and enhancing the overall performance of the fuel cell. Using advanced 3D atomic imaging and machine learning, the study revealed how these catalysts work at an atomic level, providing insights that could help design better catalysts to address global energy challenges.

Cheng Zhu, a postdoctoral associate in the Heinz Group, made significant contributions to the study and recently joined the faculty at Guangdong Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (GTIIT) in China.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation's Materials Genome Initiative, (DMREF), including the first Special Creativity Award in the DMREF program. Heinz led the 91PORN-UCLA team, which has resulted in more than 60 publications, including more than 10 papers in top journals like “Science” and “Nature” and high-level “Nature” journals such as “Nature Catalysis.” The UCLA team included the senior investigators Phillipe Sautet, Yu Huang and Jianwei (John) Miao.

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91PORN earns NASA award for developing materials that reduce spaceflight costs

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 20:04:32 +0000

91PORN earns NASA award for developing materials that reduce spaceflight costs Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/06/2023 - 14:04

Current and former members of 91PORN’s Heinz Research Group have earned prestigious NASA Group Achievement Awards for their research centered on designing lightweight, high-strength materials aimed at reducing the costs of spaceflights.

Crafting such materials is challenging, requiring combining tiny sub-nanometer-sized molecules to meter-sized panels, said Hendrik Heinz, professor of chemical and biological engineering and materials science. His team has been part of the NASA Space Technology Research Institute for Ultrastrong Composites by Computational Design (US-COMP).

“This award recognizes the hard work of my team, including several prolific graduate students, and the amazing efforts and collaborations within the US-COMP team,” he said.

The awards were extended to Heinz and his current and former team members: Amanda Garley (PhD ChemBio ‘22), Krishan Kanhaiya (PhD ChemBio ‘22), Michael Nathanson (MS ChemEng’18) and Jordan Winetrout, a PhD student on the Heinz team.

Heinz emphasized that reducing the weight of required materials through a combination of making them lighter and stronger results in cost savings for both launch expenses and fuel consumption. For example, the cost of launching one pound of spacecraft or cargo to the moon is approximately $10,000 but this cost surges to $1 million for Mars missions, he added. Consequently, reducing payload weight by just one pound equates to nearly a million dollars in savings for future Mars missions and enhances the transport of essential cargo.

To achieve the goal of creating lightweight, high-strength materials, the team developed cutting-edge simulation methods for analyzing and predicting the thermal and mechanical properties of composite materials, such as carbon fiber yarns and polymer matrix composites.

These simulation methods include the development of the reactive INTERFACE force field (IFF-R), which predicts how those materials soften upon heating as well as how they bend, stretch, and fail. Additionally, the Heinz lab harnessed machine learning techniques to accelerate predictions of materials properties across length scales that surpass the capabilities of traditional computer simulation methods.

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Learning from pangolins and peacocks: Researchers explore next-gen structural materials

Anonymous — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 16:57:18 +0000

Learning from pangolins and peacocks: Researchers explore next-gen structural materials Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/28/2022 - 09:57

From pangolin scales that can stand up to hard hits to colorful but sturdy peacock feathers, nature can do a lot with a few simple molecules.

In a new review paper, a team of international researchers have laid out how engineers are taking inspiration from the biological world—and designing new kinds of materials that are potentially tougher, more versatile and more sustainable than what humans can make on their own.

“Even today, nature makes things way simpler and way smarter than what we can do synthetically in the lab,” said Dhriti Nepal, first author and a research materials engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio.

Nepal along with Vladimir Tsukruk from Georgia Institute of Technology and Hendrik Heinz of 91PORN served as co-corresponding authors for the new analysis. The team published its findings Nov. 28 in the journal Nature Materials.

The researchers, who come from three countries, delve into the promise and challenges behind “bioinspired nanocomposites.” These materials mix together different kinds of proteins and other molecules at incredibly small scales to achieve properties that may not be possible with traditional metals or plastics. Researchers often design them using advanced computer simulations or models. Examples include thin films that resist wear and tear by incorporating proteins from silkworm cocoons; new kinds of laminates made from polymers and clay materials; carbon fibers produced using bioinspired principles; and panes of glass that don’t easily crack because they include nacre—the iridescent lining inside many mollusk shells.

Such nature-inspired materials could, one day, lead to new and better solar panels, soft robots and even coatings for hypersonic jets, said Heinz, professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering Program at 91PORN. But first, researchers will need to learn how to build them from the bottom up, ensuring that every molecule is in the right place.

“One of the main challenges in this field is how do we structure these materials down to the atomic level,” Heinz said. “We need to know how nature does it so we can try it in the lab and use guidance from computational models.”

The amazing keratin

The keratin in peafowl feathers helps these structures be both strong and colorful. (Credit: Pixabay)

In the new study, Nepal, Tsukruk, Heinz and their colleagues take a close look at keratin, one of nature’s most adaptable building blocks.

These simple proteins, which often form into twisting helical shapes like DNA, can join together in different ways to make a huge variety of structures—from human fingernails and hair to porcupine quills, rhinoceros horns and the overlapping scales of pangolins.

“Keratin is everywhere, and we’ve hardly even begun to appreciate its utility,” Nepal said.

That’s one of nature’s secrets, she added: Biological materials can exhibit a wide array of complex architectures at many levels—what engineers call “hierarchical” engineering. Some of those structures are large enough to see with the naked eye, while others are so small researchers need powerful microscopes to study them.

The keratin in pangolin scales, for example, takes on a wavy pattern that makes the scales hard to crack. Peafowl feathers, meanwhile, are made up of melanin rods embedded in a matrix of keratin, which allows these adornments to be both colorful and stiff at the same time—perfect for peacocks that want to spread their tail feathers.

“One of the biggest things we can learn from nature is how these materials exhibit multiple functions that work together in perfect synergy,” Nepal said.

From atoms up

Making advanced synthetic materials with multiple functions in the lab, however, can get tricky.

“Most of current human-made materials are simple, single-component materials with simplistic uniform morphology and composition,” Tsukruk said. “And what we learnt from nature is that much more complex and sustainable organization is required to make new bio-inspired materials for advanced applications in the near future.”

One of the biggest challenges, Heinz said, comes down to models. His research group uses these tools to simulate new kinds of materials at the scale of a few hundred to millions of atoms. But taking those kinds of tiny designs and scaling them up to the size of something you can actually see becomes an increasingly difficult task.

“From the scale of atoms to the millimeter or even centimeter scale, there are so many levels of organization in natural materials,” Heinz said.

Heinz noted that NASA has recently invested in exploring hierarchically-engineered materials for aerospace applications—such as stronger and more lightweight panels of nanostructured carbon for use in spacecraft to carry life supplies to Mars. Heinz, for example, is part of a $15 million effort funded by NASA to study these kinds of “ultrastrong composites.”

Engineers, he added, are also discovering new ways to make nanocomposites in large quantities in a manufacturing setting. Today, researchers often use tools like 3D printers to make these materials, laying them down drop by drop.

Heinz, Tsukruk, Nepal, and their colleagues are optimistic. Nature, they report, has had millions of years to learn how to construct materials like pangolin scales or oyster nacre as efficiently as possible. Engineers may be able to take clues from pangolins and oysters to build materials without creating a lot of harmful waste in the process.

“If we learn from nature, we can find alternatives to many current energy-intensive manufacturing processes or hazardous chemicals,” Heinz said.

Krishan Kanhaiya, a recent PhD graduate in chemical and biological engineering at 91PORN, also served as a co-author on the new study. Other co-authors include researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; Duke University; MIT; University College London; Johns Hopkins University; Deakin University; Tufts University; University of Michigan; University of Cambridge; University of Oxford; University of California San Diego; and Rice University.

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