Seed funding for Lisa Hall leads to ongoing collaborative research
The development of novel and emergent materials is accelerated through collaborations across various disciplines in science and engineering. This is especially true for an ongoing, interdisciplinary project researching structural polymers with unique engineering applications involving two researchers who first collaborated through an Exploratory Materials Research Grant (EMRG) funded through the OSU Materials Research Seed Grant Program.
Vishnu Baba Sundaresan, assistant professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, had envisioned an additive manufacturing technique to 3D print structural composites with piezoelectric particles embedded in the matrix. Meanwhile, Lisa Hall, assistant professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, had quantified the aggregation of ionic groups in various ionomer systems via coarse grained molecular dynamics simulations. In ionomer materials, there are several experimentally adjustable parameters such as polymer architecture, fraction of ionic groups, and nanoparticle content that all strongly affect the material properties, and it is expensive to attempt to optimize materials by experimentally synthesizing many systems across this parameter space. MD simulations can show the physics behind observed trends in structure and properties and give insight and guidance to experimental investigations. The experimental and modeling results together improve our ability to rationally design new materials.
Through the 2013 EMRG grant, the Hall group was able to support graduate student Prasant Vijayaraghavan, who simulated segmented ammonium ionenes at a coarse-grained level. In prior experimental work, changing the fraction of softer polypropylene segments (relative to polyethylene segments) was seen to impact the self-healing ability of the materials. A paper was published in Macromolecular Chemistry and Physics early this year showing that the fraction of polypropylene impacts both the degree of ionic aggregation and the local microphase segregation of the two uncharged polymers, with nonobvious effects on the dynamics that may explain the experimental observations (DOI:10.1002/macp.201500466). Vijayaraghavan obtained a Master’s degree in the Hall group, then joined the Sundaresan group for his Ph.D. studies.
The seed award from EMRG program provided continuity to this project and allowed Hall and Sundaresan to generate the preliminary data needed to clearly demonstrate the advantage of this multidisciplinary collaboration. The two collaborators then submitted a proposal to National Science Foundation’s Manufacturing Machines and Equipment (MME) Program and were awarded a three-year grant to investigate the development of an additive manufacturing technique that uses thermoelectric fields for 3D printing of smart structural composites (Figure 1).
The researchers are currently investigating the aggregation of ionic groups in a thermoplastic ionomer and simultaneous poling of nanostructured or microstructured piezoelectric particulates in 3D printing using a new extruder nozzle.
-Story by Layla Manganaro
