To relate the mechanical responses of hard-soft copolymer systems with their microstructures, a coarse-grained molecular dynamics (CGMD) approach is employed. With the generic bead-spring polymer model mapped from atomistic simulations, this dissertation first studies the morphology of structures with various hard-soft compositions and interactions between hard beads. Following that, this...
The start of the 21st century brought the sweeping proliferation of portable electronics such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. These technologies were largely enabled by advances in energy storage methods – lithium ion batteries in particular. Society's push for more advanced energy storage applications, such as electric vehicles, stresses the...
Two-dimensional (2D) materials are a promising class of electronic materials that have generated great interest to improve and create new and existing technologies. The promise of this family of materials relies on their high surface-to-volume ratio and atomic thickness in addition to their unique (opto)electric properties. However, these morphological properties...
In the United States and around the world, the growing energy demands and climate concerns necessitate renewable and efficient energy production. Thermoelectric materials could be one small part of this larger picture movement, but their high cost and low efficiency must be improved to realize commercial use. To decrease the...
Soft materials such as colloids and polymers often exhibit a variety of mesoscopic structures that are governed merely by weak physical interactions. Due to these intermediate structures, they can be easily taken out of thermal equilibrium by introducing external stimuli such as a shear flow and electromagnetic fields. This thesis...
Ultrafine particles are often used as lubricant additives because they can enter tribological contacts to reduce friction and protect surfaces from wear. They tend to be more stable than molecular additives under high thermal and mechanical stresses during rubbing. However, in lubricant oil, ultrafine particles tend to aggregate together to...
Additive manufacturing is a promising process that has the capability to build components with complex geometries for structural and biomedical applications. Due to the rapid and localized directional solidification of molten metallic alloys, unique phase transformations occur at the melt pool that can provide for components with greater strength and...
This thesis describes a series of fundamental studies that address the role of electrostatic interactions in modulating i) the permeability of the ligand shell of a colloidal quantum dot (QD) to an anionic redox probe; ii) the resulting yield of photoinduced electron exchange within the QD ‒ redox probe complex;...