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2019

University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Articles 1 - 17 of 17

Full-Text Articles in Physics

Extreme Dynamics Of Nanomaterials Under High-Rate Mechanical Stimuli, Wanting Xie Oct 2019

Extreme Dynamics Of Nanomaterials Under High-Rate Mechanical Stimuli, Wanting Xie

Doctoral Dissertations

Nanomaterials demonstrate novel mechanical properties attributed to the extremely large interfacial area. At quasi-static rates, the interfacial interactions are crucial in mechanical behaviors, however, materials under extreme mechanical stimuli are rarely studied at nanoscale. With an advanced laser-induced projectile impact test, we perform supersonic impact of micro-projectiles on polymer films, multilayer graphene, carbon- based nanocomposites membranes as well as individual micro-fibers, to study the interface interactions in the high-rate regime, and develop a simplified model to characterize the ballistic performance of materials.


Residual Stress Models For Large Eddy Simulation Of Stratified Turbulent Flows, Felipe Augusto Ventura De Bragança Alves Oct 2019

Residual Stress Models For Large Eddy Simulation Of Stratified Turbulent Flows, Felipe Augusto Ventura De Bragança Alves

Doctoral Dissertations

The residual stresses and scalar fluxes are required to close the momentum and scalar transport equations in simulations of turbulence that are not fully resolved in space. In stratified turbulence, the stress and fluxes are statistically anisotropic unless the smallest resolved length scale is smaller than the Ozmidov scale and the buoyancy Reynolds number is sufficiently high for there to exist a range of scales that is statistically isotropic. In this work, a tensorial basis set is derived analytically that potentially contains sufficient information about the anisotropic interaction between resolved and residual scales. The residual stress tensor is evaluated by …


Characterization Of The Anomalous Ph Of Aqueous Nanoemulsions, Kieran P. Ramos Oct 2019

Characterization Of The Anomalous Ph Of Aqueous Nanoemulsions, Kieran P. Ramos

Doctoral Dissertations

Aqueous water-in-oil nanoemulsions have emerged as a versatile tool for use in microfluidics, drug delivery, single-molecule measurements, and other research. Nanoemulsions are often prepared with perfluorocarbons which are remarkably biocompatbile due to their stability, low surface tension, lipophobicity, and hydrophobicity. Therefore it is often assumed that droplet contents are unperturbed by the perfluorinated surface. However, in microemulsions, which are similar to nanoemulsions, it is known that either the pH of the aqueous phase or the ionization constants of encapsulated molecules are different from bulk solution. There is also recent evidence of low pH in perfluorinated aqueous nanoemulsions. The current underlying …


Modeling And Simulation Of Driven Nanopatterning Of Bulk-Material And Thin-Film Surfaces, Ashish Kumar Oct 2019

Modeling And Simulation Of Driven Nanopatterning Of Bulk-Material And Thin-Film Surfaces, Ashish Kumar

Doctoral Dissertations

Material nanostructures such as nanowires, quantum dots, and nanorings have a wide variety of applications in electronic and photonic devices among numerous others. Assembling uniformly arranged and consistently sized nanostructure patterns on solid material surfaces is a major challenge for nanotechnology. This dissertation focuses on developing predictive models capable of simulation and analysis of such nanopattern formation on bulk material and strained thin film surfaces. Single-layer atomic clusters (islands) of sizes larger than a critical size on crystalline conducting substrates undergo morphological instabilities when driven by an externally applied electric field or thermal gradient. We have conducted a systematic and …


Amorphous-Crystalline Brush Block Copolymers: Phase Behavior, Rheology And Composite Design, Gayathri Kopanati Oct 2019

Amorphous-Crystalline Brush Block Copolymers: Phase Behavior, Rheology And Composite Design, Gayathri Kopanati

Doctoral Dissertations

Bottlebrush block copolymers are polymers with chemically distinct polymer side chains grafted onto a common backbone. The unique architecture induced properties make these materials attractive for applications such as photonic materials, stimuli responsive actuators and drug delivery vehicles to name a few. This dissertation primarily investigates the phase transitions and rheological behavior of amorphous-crystalline bottlebrush brush block copolymers and their composites. The temperature induced phase behavior is investigated using time resolved synchrotron X-ray source. Irrespective of volume fraction and backbone length, the samples display strong segregation even at high temperatures (200 °C) and there is no accessible order-disorder transition in …


Function And Dissipation In Finite State Automata - From Computing To Intelligence And Back, Natesh Ganesh Oct 2019

Function And Dissipation In Finite State Automata - From Computing To Intelligence And Back, Natesh Ganesh

Doctoral Dissertations

Society has benefited from the technological revolution and the tremendous growth in computing powered by Moore's law. However, we are fast approaching the ultimate physical limits in terms of both device sizes and the associated energy dissipation. It is important to characterize these limits in a physically grounded and implementation-agnostic manner, in order to capture the fundamental energy dissipation costs associated with performing computing operations with classical information in nano-scale quantum systems. It is also necessary to identify and understand the effect of quantum in-distinguishability, noise, and device variability on these dissipation limits. Identifying these parameters is crucial to designing …


Polymeric Impulsive Actuation Mechanisms: Development, Characterization, And Modeling, Yongjin Kim Oct 2019

Polymeric Impulsive Actuation Mechanisms: Development, Characterization, And Modeling, Yongjin Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent advances in the field of biomedical and life-sciences are increasingly demanding more life-like actuation with higher degrees of freedom in motion at small scales. Many researchers have developed various solutions to satisfy these emerging requirements. In many cases, new solutions are made possible with the development of novel polymeric actuators. Advances in polymeric actuation not only addressed problems concerning low degree of freedom in motion, large system size, and bio-incompatibility associated with conventional actuators, but also led to the discovery of novel applications, which were previously unattainable with conventional engineered systems. This dissertation focuses on developing novel actuation mechanisms …


Designing Ion-Containing Polymers With Controlled Structure And Dynamics, Joshua Enokida Oct 2019

Designing Ion-Containing Polymers With Controlled Structure And Dynamics, Joshua Enokida

Doctoral Dissertations

Ion-containing polymers are a unique class of materials for which strong electrostatic interactions dictate physical properties. By altering molecular parameters, such as the backbone chemical structure, the ion content, and the ion-pair identity, the structure and dynamics of these polymers can be altered. Further investigation of the molecular parameters that govern their structure-property relationships is critical for the future development of these polymeric materials. Particularly, the incorporation of ammonium-based counterions into these polymers offers a facile method to tune their electrostatic interactions and hydrophobicity. Applying this concept, a bulky dimethyloctylammonium (DMOA) counterion was used to modify the organic solubility of …


A Study On Homogeneous Sheared Stably Stratified Turbulence, Gavin Portwood Jul 2019

A Study On Homogeneous Sheared Stably Stratified Turbulence, Gavin Portwood

Doctoral Dissertations

Homogeneous sheared and stably stratified turbulence is considered as a fundamental flow relevant to the study of geophysical turbulence and, generally, anisotropic turbulence. Numerical experiments are performed via high resolution direct numerical simulation (DNS) in a geophysically-relevant parameter space previously inaccessible to simulation. Turbulent dynamics relevant to the modeling of geophysical hydrodynamics are investigated as a function of mean flow and fluid parameters. An active tuning scheme is implemented to induce temporally stationary turbulent kinetic energy in order to evaluate turbulence that is statistically independent of initial conditions and spatio-temporally homogeneous. Subject to this constraint, the parametric dependence of the …


Reactive And Stimuli-Responsive Sulfonium-Based Polymer Zwitterions, Cristiam Santa Chalarca Jul 2019

Reactive And Stimuli-Responsive Sulfonium-Based Polymer Zwitterions, Cristiam Santa Chalarca

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation describes the synthesis and characterization of novel monomers and (co)polymer zwitterions that incorporate trialkylsulfonium cations. The novel materials presented herein constitute a unique type of polymer zwitterions that exhibit salt- and temperature-dependent water solubility as well as inherent reactivity. The behavior of these polymers in aqueous solutions, as nanostructures, and at liquid-liquid interfaces was studied; in all cases, the inherent reactivity of the polymers was harnessed towards the fabrication of novel polymers and soft materials. Following an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 describes the synthesis of sulfonium sulfonate monomers and polymer zwitterions. Both styrenic and methacrylic monomers were synthesized …


Flow-Induced Oscillations In Floating Offshore Wind Turbines, Daniel Carlson Jul 2019

Flow-Induced Oscillations In Floating Offshore Wind Turbines, Daniel Carlson

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is to experimentally study the structural dynamics, wake interaction, and fluid forces on the multiple-degree of freedom systems typical of floating wind turbines. Vortex--surface alignment about flexibly-mounted prisms is studied to investigate the response of barges and semi-submersible hulls, and new results pertaining to the galloping response kink for a prism with dual inline--crossflow resonance is presented. Flow--induced oscillations of a spar model free to rotate in 3D space is replicated and observed as 2D figure--eight orbits about the center of the spar. Methods to suppress the flow from exciting the spar are proposed. The …


Quantitative Probing Of Vacancies And Ions Dynamics In Electroactive Oxide Materials, Jiaxin Zhu Mar 2019

Quantitative Probing Of Vacancies And Ions Dynamics In Electroactive Oxide Materials, Jiaxin Zhu

Doctoral Dissertations

Oxygen vacancy and ion dynamics in functional oxides are critical factors influencing electrical conductivity and electrochemical activity of oxides assemblies. The recent advancements in deposition and fabrication of oxide heterostructured films with atomic-level precision has led to discovery of intriguing physical properties and new artificial materials. While still under debate, researchers most often attribute these observed behaviors to unique oxygen vacancy distributions in the substrate near heterointerfaces. In electroactive oxides devices such as solid oxide cells (SOCs), oxygen vacancy and ion transport at the triple-phase boundary determines the performance of the device. This complex process motivates numerous remaining questions regarding …


Probing Quantized Excitations And Many-Body Correlations In Transition Metal Dichalcogenides With Optical Spectroscopy, Shao-Yu Chen Mar 2019

Probing Quantized Excitations And Many-Body Correlations In Transition Metal Dichalcogenides With Optical Spectroscopy, Shao-Yu Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

Layered transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have attracted great interests in recent years due to their physical properties manifested in different polytypes: Hexagonal(H)-TMDC,which is semiconducting, exhibits strong Coulomb interaction and intriguing valleytronic properties; distorted octahedral(T’)-TMDC,which is semi-metallic, is predicted to exhibit rich nontrivial topological physics. In this dissertation,we employ the polarization-resolved micron-Raman/PL spectroscopy to investigate the optical properties of the atomic layer of several polytypes of TMDC. In the first part for polarization-resolved Raman spectroscopy, we study the lattice vibration of both H and T’-TMDC, providing a thorough understanding of the polymorphism of TMDCs. We demonstrate that Raman spectroscopy is a …


Characterization And Manipulation Of The Magnetization Of Nano-Scale Magnetic Structures, Wenming Ju Mar 2019

Characterization And Manipulation Of The Magnetization Of Nano-Scale Magnetic Structures, Wenming Ju

Doctoral Dissertations

Nano-scale magnetic patterned structures and thin films have attracted attention over the past few years due to their unique magnetization distribution and promising application in nonvolatile data storage, magnetic field sensors and spintronic devices. Magnetization states and their switching processes are fundamental investigation subjects of such magnetic systems. This dissertation discusses experimental work and theoretical analysis on investigating the magnetization of these nano-scale magnetic structures and how we can characterize and manipulate the magnetization in order to realize industrial application. The efforts done in this dissertation can be grouped into three topics: First, we focus on whether we can reverse …


Characterization Of The Motion Of Cellulose Synthase Protein Complexes In The Plant Cell Membrane, Nina Zehfroosh Mar 2019

Characterization Of The Motion Of Cellulose Synthase Protein Complexes In The Plant Cell Membrane, Nina Zehfroosh

Doctoral Dissertations

The polysaccharide cellulose is the main component of plant cell walls, so it is the most abundant polymer on Earth. While it is widely used in industry due to its remarkable properties, such as renewability and biodegradability, its biosynthesis is still not well understood. The large transmembrane protein Cellulose Synthase Complex (CSC) is responsible for synthesizing cellulose by polymerizing UDP glucose into the constituent glucan chains of cellulose. In this project, I used variable angle epi-fluorescence microscopy (VAEM) in combination with single-particle tracking to characterize the motion of GFP labeled CSCs in the hypocotyl of Arabidopsis thaliana (A. thaliana …


2019 Patterns Around Us Handout, Benjamin Davidovitch, Narayanan Menon, Wayne Kermenski, Jennifer Welborn Jan 2019

2019 Patterns Around Us Handout, Benjamin Davidovitch, Narayanan Menon, Wayne Kermenski, Jennifer Welborn

Patterns Around Us

This is a FREE two-day program designed for Middle and High School General Science, Biology, Physics, Technology/Engineering teachers. It is funded by the National Science Foundation.Space is limited, so apply soon! Some limited funding is available for overnight stay.

“Science may be described as the attempt to give good accounts of the patterns in nature. The result of scientific investigation is an understanding of natural processes.... Overall, the key criterion of science is that it provides a clear, rational, and succinct account of a pattern in nature....” Massachusetts State Frameworks for Science and Technology.

Participants will explore the processes of …


Solar Cells, D. Venkataraman Jan 2019

Solar Cells, D. Venkataraman

Science and Engineering Saturday Seminars

Solar cells convert the sun's energy into electrical energy. In this workshop, I will discuss the processes involved in solar cell and various types of solar cells that are being developed as an alternative to silicon solar cells. I will also demonstrate how students can build a solar cell from readily available materials.