Polymer and Organic Materials Commons^™

Drop Wetting And Sliding On Soft, Swollen Elastomers, Zhuoyun Cai

Theses and Dissertations--Chemical and Materials Engineering

Soft, slippery surfaces have gained increasing attention due to their wide range of potential applications, for example in self-cleaning, anti-fouling, liquid collection, and more. One design approach in creating slippery surfaces is using a swollen elastomer, which is a polymer network swollen with a lubricant. This type of surface may be beneficial for longer-term use than standard lubricant-infused surfaces, and provides a versatile surface with tunable mechanical properties. Hence, understanding the physics of soft surface interactions is important for fundamental soft matter physics, biomaterials, adhesives, and coatings. This research experimentally investigates wetting on soft infused networks, with the aim of …

First-Principles Studies Of Structure-Property Relationships: Enabling Design Of Functional Materials, Qunfei Zhou

Theses and Dissertations--Chemical and Materials Engineering

First-principles calculations based on quantum mechanics have been proved to be powerful for accurately regenerating experimental results, uncovering underlying myths of experimental phenomena, and accelerating the design of innovative materials. This work has been motivated by the demand to design next-generation thermionic emitting cathodes and techniques to allow for synthesis of photo-responsive polymers on complex surfaces with controlled thickness and patterns. For Os-coated tungsten thermionic dispenser cathodes, we used first-principles methods to explore the bulk and surface properties of W-Os alloys in order to explain the previously observed experimental phenomena that thermionic emission varies significantly with W-Os alloy composition. Meanwhile, …

Magnesium-Titanium Alloys For Biomedical Applications, Ilona Hoffmann

Theses and Dissertations--Chemical and Materials Engineering

Magnesium has been identified as a promising biodegradable implant material because it does not cause systemic toxicity and can reduce stress shielding. However, it corrodes too quickly in the body. Titanium, which is already used ubiquitously for implants, was chosen as the alloying element because of its proven biocompatibility and corrosion resistance in physiological environments. Thus, alloying magnesium with titanium is expected to improve the corrosion resistance of magnesium.

Mg-Ti alloys with a titanium content ranging from 5 to 35 at.-% were successfully synthesized by mechanical alloying. Spark plasma sintering was identified as a processing route to consolidate the alloy …