Distinguished Professor of mechanical engineering Min Zou.
Inventor Spotlight: Powerhouse Researcher Min Zou
By Hardin Young
Min Zou, a Distinguished Professor of mechanical engineering at the U of A, is a leader in nanoscale surface engineering, nanomechanics and nanotribology.
Tribology is the study of friction, wear, lubrication and associated technologies. It involves exploring, understanding and improving the interaction of surfaces in relative motion. As one might imagine, not many people grow up aspiring to be tribologists.
“If you attend the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers’ annual meeting and you ask people how they got into the field, they always say it was by accident,” she said, laughing. “This is also true for me.”
When Zou was at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she earned her second master’s and her Ph.D., she heard that professor Itzhak Green was looking for a Ph.D. student in tribology. Since she needed funding for her doctorate, she applied, though all of her prior work had been in aerospace engineering. He accepted her anyway.
She worked with Green on solving tribological issues in mechanical face seals, which are important for rotating equipment, such as pumps and compressors. Because of her Ph.D. work in tribology, she was hired by Seagate Technology to work on the tribology of head-disk interfaces in hard drives. The read elements of the heads are like the needles of record players “playing” the disk (or reading from it), except the heads hover closely instead of touching the disks. However, when the computer is turned on or off, the head touches the disk in the landing zone, causing friction and wear.
This is where an understanding of tribology is needed to improve performance. To prevent wear to disks and heads, Zou helped evaluate carbon overcoats a few nanometers thick (one billionth of a meter) to protect them and make them last longer. Thus, Seagate was where her work in tribology shrank down to the nanoscale.
After nearly five years at Seagate, she decided to get into academia, joining the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the U of A in 2003. Since then, Zou has been a research powerhouse. She’s been awarded approximately $29 million in external research funding in which she serves as the principal investigator, published 139 peer-reviewed papers and been elected as a fellow in several professional societies, including the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers.
Additionally, Zou led the establishment of the statewide Center for Advanced Surface Engineering, or CASE, which is a consortium of 10 universities and 60 faculty members from various STEM-related fields. CASE focuses on developing multi-functional and tunable surfaces for product innovations that impact science, technology and industries in Arkansas.
Zou has also had eight patents granted and has three patent applications pending. Two of the issued patents, based on her students’ Ph.D. dissertation work, led to the creation of startups. The first, WattGlass, was founded on the development of a multi-functional glass coating for solar panels with self-cleaning, anti-reflective and anti-fogging properties. WattGlass has been subsequently acquired by Pellucere Technologies.
The second, SurfTec, focuses on developing and manufacturing low-friction, anti-corrosion, anti-icing and anti-fouling coatings. Technology Ventures at the U of A has facilitated the patent protection process and helped create an environment where these companies could start and grow.
Despite decades of hard work, the time has passed quickly for Zou: “I’m still thinking, ‘Wow, it’s been 21 years. It’s like it was just yesterday that I joined the university.”
One of the reasons she has enjoyed her time at the U of A is the nature of an academic job. She’s free to go where her curiosity takes her, rather than exclusively working on one thing, like head-disk interfaces. The other reason is that she’s always learning new things and working on new challenges.
For instance, she’s now developing durable, graphite-lubricant coatings for industrial conveyor systems intended to reduce energy consumption and equipment failure by decreasing friction, which tribologists are forever battling. She’s also researching a way to extend the life of an artificial hip joint by laser texturing the ball with microscopic indentations that increase the thickness of a lubricating film on its surface.
A new area she’s exploring is 3D nanoprinting a neural scaffold for studying the blood brain barrier, mimicking the brain capillaries. If this doesn’t sound like traditional tribology, it’s not. Past success in nanomanufacturing and surface engineering has given her the foundation to branch into new, interdisciplinary areas.
“I mostly think about the potential applications,” she says. “That has actually become more and more important to me when picking a project.”
To that end, the war on friction will continue. .