With an NSF CAREER Award, the AE researcher will apply mechanics expertise to reduce trash and improve recycling.
The National Science Foundation has awarded Christos Athanasiou its most prestigious funding for early career researchers, a Faculty Early Career Development Award. The five-year grants are designed to help promising researchers establish a foundation for a lifetime of leadership in their field.
Athanasiou is an assistant professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is driven by nature’s uncanny ability to reuse materials, exploring what the planet can teach us about designing material recycling strategies for the future. In nature there is essentially no trash.
For example, in forests act as natural recycling plants: all compounds are constantly reordered and reused, becoming new trees and plants. Athanasiou aims to apply his expertise in mechanics to maximize material reuse and recycling. The goal?
To eliminate trash, reduce the exploitation of finite fossil resources, and avoid the associated environmental impacts.
Plastic recycling in particular poses significant challenges. Recycled plastics often fail at lower capacities than their newly created counterparts, which limits the use of recycled plastic in new products. He said this gap highlights the need for a deeper understanding of the fundamental principles that lead to material failure.
Athanasiou and his team are developing design strategies to enhance the performance of recycled polymers, or recyclates. Using state-of-the-art manufacturing methods, they aim to create materials that not only match the durability of new plastic while also accounting for supply chain constraints and considerations.
Supply chains and relevant infrastructure have grown significantly in both size and complexity, making it increasingly difficult to incorporate material reuse and recycling effectively without fundamental advancements in mechanics of materials.
In a perspective published recently in the Journal of Applied Mechanics, Athanasiou and researchers Xing Liu and Huajian Gao outlined these challenges and promising directions to address the complex problem. They emphasized the importance of creating new fundamental mechanics knowledge through experimentation and artificial intelligence.
“Material reuse is crucial for sustainability both on and off Earth,” Athanasiou said. “We need a framework for reusing our resources and transforming them into new products. Our vision is to create a holistic framework to achieve net-zero goals on Earth and to efficiently use our resources in space to enable sustainable space economies and space manufacturing.”