Event
ChBE Seminar Series: Dynamics of 2D particles at fluid-fluid interfaces
Tuesday, December 8, 2020
11:00 a.m.
via Zoom
Taylor Woehl
tjwoehl@umd.edu
https://chbe.umd.edu/seminar-series
Speaker: Joseph R. Samaniuk, Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering,
Colorado School of Mines
Abstract:
Our lab focuses on research areas where rheology, colloidal phenomena, and interfacial phenomena are all relevant. This presentation will focus on our efforts to study the interactions of two-dimensional particles at fluid-fluid interfaces. Two-dimensional (2D) materials are a set of sub-nanometer-thick materials that have attracted interest across scientific disciplines due to unique quantum confinement phenomena. There have been significant efforts to exploit these phenomena in thin-film technologies, and fluid-fluid interfaces can act as a low-cost and high-throughput construction site to confine, assemble, and deposit thin films of 2D materials onto arbitrary substrates. Functional film properties are governed by film morphology, which in turn is dependent on the dynamics of self-assembly. Therefore, one must understand the forces involved in particle self-assembly to engineer thin films with desirable properties. Recent developments in microscopy have enabled direct visualization of atomically thin particles at fluid-fluid interfaces, which has allowed us to probe open questions regarding how these particles differ in their interactions from conventional colloidal particles where thickness and lateral size are of the same length scale. Our ongoing work in this area is focused on understanding how 2D particle size and shape influences the interactions and assembly of these materials at fluid-fluid interfaces. I will present details on our efforts to understand the lateral interactions and assembly of 2D particles at fluid-fluid interfaces via experiments on in-house fabricated 2D particles with controlled size and shape, and our attempts to understand the dynamics of stacking of these particles with a combination of experimental work and molecular dynamics simulations.
Bio:
Dr. Samaniuk is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. His research group focuses on the rheology and dynamics of bulk, and interfacial, soft matter systems. Current projects include the study of the dynamics of 2D materials confined to fluid-fluid interfaces, the development of new active microrheological techniques, the rheology of fluids for underground tunneling, and the rheology of asphaltene-stabilized emulsions. Joe’s MS and BS degrees in Chemical Engineering were earned at Virginia Tech, and he obtained his PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for his work investigating the rheological properties of lignocellulosic biomass. After his doctorate he was awarded a Pegasus Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Belgian science foundation Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) to investigate the use of microrheological methods at fluid-fluid interfaces in the laboratory of Jan Vermant, within the Department of Chemical Engineering at KU Leuven. His second postdoctoral position was in the Materials Science Department at ETH Zürich where he continued to study the dynamics and rheology of interfacial systems. His ongoing research interests focus broadly on linking microstructure and material behavior; links that enable one to design new experimental methods for the laboratory, formulate novel advanced materials, and propose new strategies for solving important industrial problems.
