The introduction of certain controlled gradients in plastic properties is known to promote resistance to the onset of damage at contact surfaces during some tribological applications. Gradients in composition, microstructure and plastic properties can also be deleterious to contact-damage resistance in some situations. In order to realize such potentially beneficial or deleterious effects of pl...

A novel scheme is presented for the synthesis of graded materials by electrodeposition in porous insulating templates. Lateral control of copper electrodeposition in nanoporous alumina membranes is achieved by application of a lateral potential gradient on a thin Au film evaporated on the membrane, used as the cathode. Formation of metal gradients in the membranes is shown to occur under condit...

The work applies topology optimisation to the design of functionally graded materials (FGMs) and materialinterfaces for thermomechanical problems. It is well known, that the mismatch in stiffness and thermal expansioncoefficient of two materials give rise to high stresses at the interface. One way to alleviate this is to use the conceptof FGMs [1]. The FGMs are here designed using t...

We have investigated the transmission and reflection properties of structures incorporating left-handed materials with graded index of refraction. We present an exact analytical solution to Helmholtz' equation for a graded index profile changing according to a hyperbolic tangent function along the propagation direction. We derive expressions for the field intensity along the graded index struct...

This paper presents a review of the principal developments in functionally graded materials (FGMs) with an emphasis on the recent work published since 2000. Diverse areas relevant to various aspects of theory and applications of FGM are reflected in this paper. They include homogenization of particulate FGM, heat transfer issues, stress, stability and dynamic analyses, testing, manufacturing an...

We have studied the effective response of composites of spherical particles with a dielectric profile which varies along the radius of the particles. We developed a differential effective dipole theory to compute the dipole moment of individual spherical particle and hence the effective dielectric response of a dilute suspension. The theory has been applied to two model dielectric profiles. Mor...