Dr. MORTEN MATTRUP SMEDSKJÆR

Department of Chemistry and Bioscience
Aalborg University, DK

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​​​​​Bio​

Morten M. Smedskjaer is Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Bioscience at Aalborg University, Denmark and head of the Glass Structure and Mechanics Group. He received his PhD degree in materials chemistry from the same university in 2011 and worked as a research scientist at Corning Inc. from 2011 to 2012. His current research focuses on the structure and mechanical properties of disordered materials. He has five granted patents and over 200 journal articles. He received an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2022 and is a fellow of both the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences and the Danish Academy of Natural Sciences. His awards include Vittorio Gottardi Prize, Sir Alastair Pilkington Award, Grundfos Prize, and Best PhD Award from the Danish Academy of Natural Sciences.

​Presentation ​

​Improving the Mechanical Properties of Glasses from the Bottom-Up

Oxide glasses with improved damage and fracture resistance are critically needed. Traditionally, new glass compositions have been developed through time-consuming trial-and-error experimentation. In this talk, I will discuss the recent progress in designing oxide glass compositions with improved mechanical properties from the bottom-up. Such design is building on knowledge of the deformation mechanism of glasses under high local stress, and by appropriately tailoring microstructures, glass materials with improved resistance to crack initiation and growth can be discovered. To this end, tuning of the glass chemistry is crucial to control the structural and topological transformations that occur under stress to enable energy dissipation. I will also discuss the new insights from atomistic simulations combined with topological analysis tools to unravel such stress-driven structural changes.