Minglonghai Zhang completes CFPR research residency

International scholar Minglonghai Zhang has recently finished a research residency with the Graphene Application Lab at the CFPR.

Between January and June 2021 Ming, a PhD student at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, collaborated with the CFPR team on investigating auxetic materials with a negative Poisson’s ratio.  Supervised by Dr Nazmul Karim they developed graphene-based auxetic composite materials which prove an opposite deformation behaviour compared with conventional materials and have special properties such as enhanced energy absorption, better indentation resistance, synclastic curvature, shape fitting and pore opening. So far, different types of manmade auxetic materials including foams, textiles and composites have been developed.  

This project will lead to further international collaborations between researchers from UWE Bristol and Hong Kong Polytechnic University on graphene-based composites and wearable textiles. The team hope to organise visits, keynote speeches, and collaborate on collaborative funding application in the future.