Howdy and welcome to TEX-M!

Materials That Don’t Quit When Things Get Hot

All materials have a breaking point. Push them past a certain temperature, throw them into a stream of hot, dusty, corrosive gas, and they warp, crack, melt or simply burn away.

The TEX-M Lab explores where those failures happen and develops materials and systems solutions to push the limits of survival

We design and build materials systems that hold up at 1500°C and keep going past 3000°C, in the kind of brutal conditions that destroy almost everything else. Think rocket nozzles, hypersonic leading edges, gas turbine hot sections, and plasma-facing surfaces of fusion reactors. We operate at the edge of what physics allows.

Here’s what we actually do:

We design materials for the extremes

Metals, ceramics, ablatives, coatings, and combinations of all four. We engineer them to survive temperatures from 1500°C to well over 3000°C, often under harsh thermochemical environments, such as oxidation, dust, and abrasion. Though the problem is tough, the goal is simple: survive under conditions where nothing else can.

We make shapes that shouldn’t be makeable

The toughest, most heat-resistant materials are usually the hardest to form into useful shapes. We get around that using combinations of additive manufacturing, self-propagating synthesis, topologically interlocking structures, and ultra-high-temperature sintering.

We test at thermal extremes

Extreme-environment materials aren’t proven until tested by fire. We expose parts to high temperatures, high heat flux, high mass flow, and aggressive chemical reactivity, recreating the conditions they’ll face in applications. We study the degradation mechanisms, learn, and adapt.

We measure what others can’t

Knowing a material’s physical properties at extreme temperature takes special care. Just knowing the temperature of an extremely hot body turns out to be a tough challenge. We characterize physical properties at very high temperatures using radiometry, diffraction, dilatometry, calorimetry, and thermal diffusivity.

Want to join our team or start a collaboration? Let’s talk!