Understanding organization of soft materials on mesoscopic and nanoscopic scales is importantfor materials design. In this regard, non-van der Waals interactions such as hydrogen
bonding and electrostatic interactions offer great opportunities due to the richness and diversity
in morphological structures they produce. The primary reason for this is that these...
Since its introduction as an artist’s pigment in the earth 20th century, titanium white has become one of the most common white pigments. The early formulations of titanium white contained anatase, which has been studied to facilitate degradation of oil paint under UV illumination. Around the 1940s production shifted to...
Wireless power strategies are critical to system level implementation of bio-integrated devices. To achieve mechanically robust, manufacturable systems, batteries are often integrated as an on-board power source to support sensing, wireless communication and signal conditioning. Unfortunately, most sources of battery power use hazardous and environmentally harmful materials, which frustrate incorporation...
Biomineralization relies on the regulation of localized environments to control how minerals are formed. Through the use of confinement and specific additives, the organism is able to change the energy landscape of nucleation and growth to build single crystals with unusual morphologies. In order to better understand the environments in...
Industrial processes heavily rely on catalysts to control product selectivity and lower energy barriers required for chemical transformations. Catalysts are most commonly solid heterogeneous catalysts that facilitate separations from reaction mixtures and enhance recyclability. Heterogeneous catalysts used in industrial processes exhibit efficacious results, but in certain instances drawing structure-function relationships...
Selecting the best material to deliver optimum performance in real-world applications is one of the most significant challenges in engineering. Hundreds of thousands of computationally-predicted, but experimentally unexplored materials exist today in the public inorganic material databases as candidates for consideration. This thesis discusses three projects in the domain of...
From the early usage of metallic thin films as mirrors tracing back to 2900 BC, to the modern thin film photonic circuits as a mature optical processing platform, and to the growing class of atomically-thin two-dimensional (2D) materials with diverse and tailorable properties, thin film materials have played an important...
In this dissertation, I summarize my findings of the dynamics of colloidal suspensions over a large range of volume fractions in two systems: drop impact and film rupture. The existence of a deformable surface in both these systems allows me to capture the consequences of non-Newtonian flow using high-speed imaging....
Elemental powder blends are an emerging alternative to prealloyed powders for high-throughput alloy design via additive manufacturing techniques due to their flexibility, low cost, and ease of customization. This dissertation investigates elemental alloying elements (Sc and Zr) which are high-melting and highly reactive, unlike previous work which focused on more...
Protein-based biomaterials are widely used in biomedical applications and mechanical support because of their novel structural flexibility, biocompatibility and mechanical properties. Protein-based biomaterials outperform traditional synthetic materials in various environments as traditional materials lack the diverse chemical functionalities that proteins offer. Novel bioinspired techniques such as directed evolution offer the...