(183ag) Assembly and Processing of Titania Nanorods into Mesomorphic Ceramics
AIChE Annual Meeting
2019
2019 AIChE Annual Meeting
Materials Engineering and Sciences Division
Poster Session: Materials Engineering & Sciences (08D - Inorganic Materials)
Monday, November 11, 2019 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm
Liquid crystalline order of molecular mesogens within organic thin films can impart optical anisotropy from nematic order or photonic stop-band behavior from cholesteric order. Analogously, colloidal dispersions of inorganic oxide nanoparticles can self-assemble into lyotropic mesophases or can be aligned by external fields into unidirectionally ordered films. Our research aims to improve the assembly of inorganic particles into well ordered, optically dense films that can subsequently be thermally calcined and sintered to form optical materials with high transmittance, low scatter, and anisotropy. The resulting inorganic materials, formed from nanorod assembly analogous to molecular assembly, retain fixed supramolecular order from sintering and are referred to as mesomorphic ceramics. This new class of ceramic materials could serve as optical waveplates, phase retarders and optical elements with tunable stopbands. The approach of using particle assembly to create such optical films is novel and is expected to result in highly stable, full density inorganic films that can be easily scaled over large areas.