Pavana Prabhakar, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and Charles G. Salmon Fellow of Structural Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will develop a system for studying how materials degrade under extreme heat through a new U.S. Department of Defense grant.
Prabhakar is among 185 researchers across the country to receive a grant through the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program.
She plans to use the $256,565 grant to create what she calls an integrated system for ultra-high temperature exposure of materials. Such a system would allow her to conduct basic research to understand how ceramic and other composite materials fail in an extreme environment.