The
Chemical
Engineering
Department
is
hosting
a
special
graduate
seminar
about Flow-Induced
Structuring
of
Soft
Matter
at
Multiple
Scales.
Abstract:
Multiphasic soft matter is often coupled with flow to create complex materials with useful physical properties (e.g., rheology) for a range of consumer products (e.g., skin creams, salad dressings and paints). Beyond their existing use in everyday products, however, the engineering of dynamic interfacial phenomena of multiphasic soft matter under flow also promises the design of future classes of functional soft matter to address pressing societal issues involving environmental sustainability and energy-saving materials.
This presentation will primarily focus on strategies for soft matter design via flow-induced structuring, from molecular scales to macroscopic scales, and with diverse emergent physical properties. First, I will describe a new nano-/micro-fabrication platform using liquid/liquid templates for the synthesis of polymer materials possessing a range of distinct morphologies. I will illustrate the promise of this approach with reference to a remarkable example of structured polymeric materials, so-called “soft dendritic colloids,” which have morphologies reminiscent of molecular dendrimers, except that they are two orders of magnitude larger in size. Due to their engineered morphology, soft dendritic colloids exhibit strong adhesion and efficient structuring properties.
In the second part of my talk, I will describe tunable topological emulsions that are prepared by exploiting electrohydrodynamic flow. The molecular-scale ordering of liquid crystalline molecules leads to the microscale ordering of emulsions, which in turn enables multistable states of the emulsions to be realized. I will discuss the potential utility of this new class of soft matter by describing potential energy-saving applications that emerge from the multiple stable states.