Newnham Honored by Turnbull Lectureship
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Newnham Honored by Turnbull Lectureship Robert Newnham, Alcoa Professor of Solid State Science at The Pennsylvania State University, has been selected as the 1996 recipient of the David Turnbull Lectureship. He was cited for "pioneering the field of ceramic composites for electronic and optical applications, and in recognition of a distinguished career of guiding students, lecturing, and writing." The David Turnbull Lectureship recognizes the career of a scientist who has made outstanding contributions to understanding materials phenomena and properties through research, writing, and lecturing, as exemplified by David Turnbull. Widely known as a gifted scientist and teacher in the materials community, Newnham developed the concept and nomenclature for electrically active ceramic composites. He was responsible for not only the theory behind these composites, but also for their translation into "smart" materials and devices (a term he coined). Composite materials have found a number of structural applications, but their use in electronics is surprisingly widespread but unrecognized. Newnham has developed a number of concepts to apply composite materials to electronics—sum and product properties (which involve a property from multiple constituents or combining different properties of multiple phases), connectivity patterns (which determine field and force concentration), the importance of periodicity and scale in resonant structures, the symmetry of composite materials and its influence on physical properties, polychromatic percolation and coupled conduction paths in composites, varistor action and other interfacial effects, coupled phase-transformation phenomena in composites, and the important role that porosity and inner surface area play in many composite sensors. Based on the newly discovered "repla-
mine form" process for making what he would later designate as 3-3 composites, Newnham (and colleague L.E. Cross) designed the first composite of lead zirconate titanate (PZT, the well-known transducer material PtyAr^TiJO) and polymer that increased the figure of merit of electromechanical transducers by a factor of 103. In the replamine process, a natural structure is copied in other materials by a "lostwax" technique similar to that used by sculptors. Based on his thorough understanding of the interaction of a tailored composite microstructure with the electromagnetic spectrum, he went on to design dozens of composites for specific applications. He recently applied the same principles to smart systems by designing unique sensor and actuator combinations specific to the task. Newnham is known as an innovator, including complex composite sensors based on the biomimetic principles learned from the bat's ear, and fish bladders used for emitting grunts. He has incorporated several materials into real devices, with many of them entering real-
world products. As an academician, he is unusual in moving along the continuum of pure theory to material to device to commercialization. As a lecturer, Newnham is known around th
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