Pouya Shojaei (Mechanical Engineering) will have a new study appear in the Journal of Composites Part B: Engineering — a highly ranked journal in the areas of materials science and composites. Collaborators included UNLV’s Mohamed Trabia, Brendan O’Toole and Richard Jennings (all Mechanical Engineering) with material preparation from Xing Zhang and Yilang Liao at UNR. The study, “Enhancing Hypervelocity Impact Resistance of Titanium Substrate Using Ti/SiC Metal Matrix Nanocomposite Coating” included experiments performed using a two-stage light gas gun accompanied by a modeling approach using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics. They found a nanocomposite coating was able to improve the hypervelocity impact resistance of the substrate, compared to the uncoated specimens. This accomplishment could lead to the next research efforts toward fabrication of thin micrometeoroids and orbital debris shields in the aerospace industry. Shojaei is a doctoral student.