Research
Plastics are everywhere - packaging, tires, adhesives...
Commodity plastics are filled with organic and inorganic additives to modify properties like color, transparency, strength, and cost. In materials manufacturing, polymer and particle physics compete across a wide range of length and timescales.
Research Goals
We are interested in the structural evolution of mutating polymer systems: dynamic processes of gelation, vitrification, or even degradation. Our aim is to utilize a combination of characterization techniques to decouple competitive effects in terms of viscoelasticity, structure, and molecular level interactions. Ultimately, we believe that decoupling these parameters and length-scale behaviors will lead to system tunability across the materials lifetime.
We develop advanced numerical techniques to efficiently obtain pertinent rheological data of viscoelastic materials undergoing a dynamic process. These enhanced rheological methods should allow us to optimally decouple time and frequency domains in oscillatory shear measurements, which is crucial to understanding the viscoelastic character of rapidly evolving systems.
We are interested in the processing of low volatile organic content (VOC), quick dry paints and coatings. The rheological properties are carefully controlled by understanding the structure and interactions between components in the formulation. We use in-situ rheological and optical techniques to characterize the drying process, aiming to optimize efficiency and tailor formulations for enhanced coating performance.
Equipment and Instrumentation
Polymer Processing
FlackTek Speedmixer
Our Impact
As chemical engineers, we are motivated to work on relevant problems and provide solutions with real world impact. We are part of an urban campus community at the University of Cincinnati and exercise our social obligation to preserve and protect the environment.