Beth Opila explores oxidation and thermodynamics of materials during two research visits.Beth Opila, professor of materials science and engineering and director of the Rolls-Royce University Technology Center on Advanced Material Systems at UVA, returns this month from a research sabbatical. She spent six months at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, where she studied the effect of ultraviolet light on the function of oxides; if successful, this opens a new area of sensor development for gas detection.
She is finishing up a second research visit at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology developing materials' thermodynamic predictive capabilities. Opila is building a database to help her lab group anticipate how materials survive in extreme environments. This interplay of computational and experimental materials sciences will benefit coatings development underway in her group within the Rolls-Royce University Center.