UC Santa Barbara materials assistant professor Daniel Oropeza has received the Global Young Investigator Award from the American Ceramic Society’s Engineering Ceramics Division. The annual accolade recognizes outstanding young ceramic engineers and scientists for their significant achievements to the field. 

“I am honored to be selected for this award and recognized as an emerging leader in ceramics,” said Oropeza, who earned his PhD in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The recognition also validates the direction of our research and indicates that the ACS believes that my research group is doing impactful work.” 

Oropeza studies the fundamentals of materials processing for aerospace and extreme environments, including platforms for hypersonics, spacecraft, and renewable and conventional energy generation. His research group explores the fundamentals of additive manufacturing, better known as 3D printing, for metals and ceramics. They are investigating how processing parameters and feedstocks, which are the raw materials used to manufacture another product, influence a material’s microstructures, properties, and performance. His lab specializes in novel refractory and magnetic alloys processed through additive manufacturing, and also studies inkjet-based manufacturing and how machine learning can be used to optimize and automate manufacturing processes. 

A key instrument in the Oropeza lab is the Amazemet rePowder, an ultrasonic atomization unit capable of processing metallic elements and metal alloys having melting points of up to 3500 degrees Celcius. His team uses the equipment to fabricate their own metal powders.

“You can think about ultrasonic atomization like a water mister on a patio, where water vibrates extremely rapidly to create water droplets,” he explains. “Ultrasonic atomization does the same thing, but with metals that have been melted at extremely high temperatures.”

When the liquified metals vibrate at those extremely high speeds, they expel fine particulates from the surface. The droplets solidify in a surrounding inert gas atmosphere and form metal powders. 

Recently, Oropeza’s work in the field drew financial support from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), which awarded him with a three-year, $450,000 grant to develop a predictive framework to correlate metal powder characteristics to ultrasonic atomization process parameters. The ONR hopes the technique will allow them to make equipment repairs at sea by using 3D-printed metals that are created with powders manufactured by ultrasonic atomization.

“We are trying to better understand the process so that we can achieve high efficiency and high yield when it comes to turning metal into powder,” explained Oropeza, who joined the UCSB Materials Department in July 2023. “It’ll be much easier for the Navy to store bulk metallic feedstock at the depot. So when they need to make repairs, they could run a small amount of metal through the atomizer to create a powder, which they can then insert into an additive manufacturing system.” 

Designed to prepare underrepresented students for employment in technical fields, the ONR grant also includes funding for both undergraduate and graduate students to complete research in Oropeza’s lab. The grant is a win-win for Oropeza. 

“As a Hispanic scientist who grew up in Mexico, I have made it one of my priorities to provide research opportunities for people who may want to pursue careers in science and engineering, but never thought that it was an option for them,” said Oropeza. “No one in my family attended graduate school before me, so I had never considered it until a mentor mentioned it to me as a possibility. For me, this ONR award is as much about advancing representation in manufacturing as it is about advancing science.”