Welcome to Tsukamoto laboratory’s home page !! Our interest is in design, fabrication and characterization of advanced materials such as composite materials. Composites, which consist of metals and ceramics, are of our main target. Functionally graded materials (FGMs) are a kind of multi-phase composites to be engineered with smooth spatial variations of material constituents. Such variations result in inhomogeneous structures with smoothly varying thermal, mechanical, electrical and magnetic properties. The advantages of using FGMs as an alternative to two dissimilar materials (ceramics and metals) joined directly together include smoothing of thermal stress distributions across the layers, minimization or elimination of stress concentrations and singularities at the interface corners and increase in bonding strength. The composites in our recent study are listed below.

1. Ceramic-metal functionally graded materials (FGMs), consisting of zirconia, titanium, stainless steel, nickel alloys etc.
2. Metal-metal functionally graded materials (FGMs), consisting of aluminum, magnesium, titanium, stainless steel, nickel alloys etc.
3. Carbon nanotube (CNT) reinforced aluminum composites
4. Carbon nanotube (CNT) reinforced magnesium composites
5. SiC whisker and particle reinforced magnesium composites
6. Shape memory alloy reinforced aluminum composites
7. Carbon nanotube reinforced lead-free solders