講者：游琇伃教授
演講題目：Density-functional theories for solvent-free nanoparticle-organic hybrid materials
演講時間：12/30（五）15:30~17:20
演講地點：博雅館 201
主持人：吳乃立教授
Speaker biography:
Dr. Hsiu-Yu Yu joined our department as an Assistant Professor this August. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 2004 and 2006, respectively. She then earned her Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University in 2012, and obtained postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Yu’s primary research interests are utilizing statistical mechanics and colloidal hydrodynamics with engineering models to understand how macroscopic properties of complex fluids are related to microscopic physics, and applying the fundamental understanding to drive the innovation toward applications in advanced materials design and engineering nanomedicine.
Density-functional theories for solvent-free nanoparticle-organic hybrid materials
Nanoparticle-organic hybrid materials (NOHMs) are a new type of complex fluids consisting of 10 nm diameter spherical inorganic core particles surface-functionalized with oligomeric organic molecules with no other solvent. The absence of a solvent, the small size of the nanocores and oligomers, and the incompressibility of the tethered oligomeric fluid make the interparticle interactions non-pairwise-additive. Making use of a classical density-functional approach for model hard spheres with tethered bead-spring chains, one may obtain a direct description of the system free energy as a functional of the probability densities of cores and oligomers without assuming pairwise additivity. In this talk, I will demonstrate that based on the coarse-grained model and the mean-field theories, striking structural properties, phase behavior, and transport properties of these materials are governed by the oligomer-configurational entropy as the tethered hairs have to uniformly fill the interstitial space. These predicted material properties not only agree with relevant molecular dynamics simulations and experiments, but further guide the advanced applications such as carbon capture using NOHMs.