The Performance Materials Laboratory develops advanced materials and diagnostic methods for three connected challenges: protecting aircraft and spacecraft in extreme environments, replacing petroleum-based plastics with waste-stream biocomposites, and tracking the contaminants moving through the world’s oceans. Our work spans the laboratory bench, industry manufacturing floors, and field expeditions from the Arctic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea.
Advanced Materials & Coatings
Extreme environments, from hypersonic flight to spacecraft thermal control, demand coatings that can survive temperatures and friction conditions that destroy conventional materials. Our lab develops and characterizes ultra-hard ceramic coatings, building on more than a decade of additive manufacturing and materials characterization work.
Evaluating Exotic Borides for Hypersonic and Spacecraft Applications
Boron materials, are among the hardest ceramics known, with a Vickers hardness of 45 to 70 GPa and an unusually low coefficient of friction as a thin-film coating. Our team is characterizing the material’s thermal stability and optical properties as a candidate coating for hypersonic vehicle surfaces and spacecraft thermal control systems.
Student researchers are using density functional theory to model the electronic structure and optical constants, then validating those predictions against FTIR reflectance spectra collected from Boron materials films deposited in the lab, work that will feed into a manuscript on Boron material’s optical and thermal characterization.
This work builds on a foundation of 3 granted U.S. patents in fiber-optic and photonic manufacturing, plus 2 additional patents pending on Boron materials coating technology.
Sustainable & Biobased Materials
Roughly three-quarters of a plastic product’s carbon footprint can be traced to the raw material itself rather than to how it’s manufactured. Our lab develops biocomposite materials that replace a portion of petroleum-based plastic with waste-stream cellulose fibers, without sacrificing the strength, processing speed, or appearance manufacturers require.
Extracting Cellulose Microfibers from North Carolina Hemp Hurd
Undergraduate researchers Liam Eckhart and Shamar Lindo, working with Masters student Ali Alkhabbaz, are extracting cellulose microfibers from waste hemp hurd, the woody core of the hemp stem, grown in North Carolina. Comparing particle-size grades, the team found that finely sieved materials produced fiber purity comparable to the finest-milled grade while yielding more than twice as much fiber by weight, work presented at UNC Charlotte’s Office of Undergraduate Research symposium and now scaling up to produce enough fiber for full biocomposite formulation testing.
Clean Water Security
Two of the most persistent classes of water contaminants, PFAS (“forever chemicals”) and microplastics, are turning up in places once assumed to be pristine. Our lab conducts field expeditions to sample these contaminants directly, from Arctic sea ice to Caribbean reefs, and synthesizes decades of published data to track how contamination is changing over time.
Contamination at the Geographic North Pole
In September 2025, our lab conducted a trans-Arctic research expedition aboard the icebreaker Le Commandant Charcot, sampling seawater along a transect from Svalbard to Nome, Alaska, that crossed the geographic North Pole, the Magnetic North Pole, and the Arctic Pole of Inaccessibility, the point in the ocean farthest from any landmass.
This work, conducted with collaborators at the University of Rhode Island and the University of Colorado Boulder, UNC Charlotte’s Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, and the Sustainable Seas Institute, is in preparation for submission.
Two Decades of Global PFAS Trends
In collaboration with the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography, our lab synthesized PFAS concentration data from 118 peer-reviewed studies published between 2002 and 2023. The analysis found that ocean PFAS concentrations declined significantly over that period, driven by phase-outs of legacy compounds like PFOS and PFOA, while inland waterways showed no significant decline.
The Arctic Ocean stood out as the only major ocean basin with a statistically significant increasing trend, a finding consistent with long-range atmospheric transport of PFAS toward the poles. The compiled dataset is published and freely available:
Undergraduate researcher Sean Phillips extended this work at the 2026 National Conference on Undergraduate Research, modeling the transport of PFAS into the Arctic Ocean.
Funding, Collaborators & Getting Involved
Our research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technology Office, and industry partners including Rubbermaid and Newell Brands, together totaling more than $1 million in federal and industrial research funding. We collaborate with researchers at the University of Rhode Island, the University of Colorado Boulder, NC State University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Sustainable Seas Institute aboard the research vessel Dawn.
Undergraduate and graduate students drive much of the work described above. If you’re interested in joining the lab, visit the Contact page to reach out.