Vienna Wong is a recipient of the prestigious FutureNow Scholarship from ANSTO to conduct research into the development of ultra-high temperature ceramics (UHTCs) in partnership with Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG). UHTCs are the only materials that can withstand the extreme environments in different nuclear, defence, and aerospace applications and Vienna aims to correlate the properties of UHTCs with differences in the compositional and processing parameters used for fabrication. This will assist in optimising the fabrication routes for these novel materials, leading to superior properties along with lower energy consumption and costs. Success in this project will enable technology scale up and near-net shape production for commercial applications.
Vienna, who is primarily supervised by Dr Pramod Koshy and Prof. Chris Sorrell at UNSW, and A/Prof. Ondrej Muransky at ANSTO, commenced her PhD in March 2022.