(3bb) Design and Processing of Soft Matter Materials

The last decade has seen an explosive technological advance in the design of soft matter materials such as nanogel suspensions, biomaterials, active matter, and designer polymer melts. At the same time, advances in material processing techniques such as nanoparticle nucleation, fused-filament fabrication and electrospinning have reduced the cost of production of such materials, allowing for their increasing prevalence in the consumer and industrial markets. My goal is to lead a research group to develop predictive models for the design and processing of soft matter materials. My group will initially focus on three research topics related to this overarching goal.

1. Fused-filament fabrication: Fused-filament fabrication (FFF) is an additive manufacturing technique which dominates the consumer market due to the simplicity and low cost of the method. The material strength of three-dimensional objects constructed from melt-based additive manufacturing techniques such as fused-filament fabrication depends on the mechanical properties of the individual filaments and of the welds between filaments. My group will use constitutive equations predicting polymer stretch and disentanglement that I developed during my postdoc to develop continuum simulations of the solidification and welding process. We will use these results to determine how processing conditions and materials influence the material properties of printed devices, allowing us to design rules for the rational control of the material properties of 3D printed devices.

2. Suspension rheology of nucleation, growth, and aggregation: Rheo-optical measurements using the recently developed rheo-Raman microscope have revealed that the rheological response of crystalizing polymer melts is set by the nucleation, growth, and aggregation of spherical crystalline domains. My group will apply the theoretical methods of aggregation kinetics and suspension rheology to derive kinetic equations governing the rheology of suspensions undergoing nucleation, growth, and aggregation. We will use these results to derive kinetic mean-field continuum equations that can be used in simulations and analytical theory. These results will have applications to the modeling of polymer melt processing flows such as additive manufacturing, injection molding, and electrospinning, as well as the hydration of cement, the rheology of emulsions, and in the growth and nucleation of nanoparticles in solvent.

3. Micromechanics of deformable particles: The deformability of nano- and micro-gel particles, micelles, and elastic capsules allows for a variety of applications beyond those of rigid colloids. For instance, the deformability of nanogels reduces their accumulation in tissues in drug delivery applications. My group will develop a theoretical framework for the description of particles undergoing deformation in response to arbitrary imposed fields, including imposed flows, electric fields, and changes in pH. The results will be used to develop three key advances in the field of deformable bodies: a statistical mechanics description of diffusion, particulate level simulation methods, and mean-field constitutive equations. Our results will have application in a variety of industrial and pharmaceutical contexts that utilize microgels such as water filtration, oil recovery, and drug delivery, as well as the development of constitutive equations for biological fluids such as blood and algae solutions.

Teaching Interests:

My educational and research background has given me the knowledge and experience necessary to teach undergraduate classes in fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer, engineering mathematics and computer science, and unit operations, as well as graduate level fluid mechanics and mathematics courses. I am interested in teaching and developing classes in rheology and applied mathematics. I have been a teaching assistant for the introductory graduate fluid mechanics course at Cornell University and a microhydrodynamics elective course at Stanford University. In teaching undergraduate courses, I believe that it is important to maintain a balance between teaching fundamental physical mechanism and engineering practice. I will emphasize communication skills and teamwork through presentations and group work when appropriate for the course in order to prepare students for the collaborative nature of modern engineering. At the graduate level, I believe it is important to connect the core mathematical concepts taught in introductory courses to active areas of research in order to give an anchor for some of the abstract concepts introduced at the graduate level.

Ph.D. Dissertation: Micromechanical modeling of heterogeneous dispersions

Ph.D. Advisor: Prof. Roseanna N. Zia

Postdoc Project: Continuum simulation of polymer deposition in Fused-Filament Fabrication

Postdoc Advisor: Prof. Peter D. Olmsted