Biosketch
My research is in the creation of architected blends. Creating architected blends is an efficient way to take advantage of the high strength to weight ratio of plastic materials. Most polymers, when blended together, are immiscible and will have weak interfaces during melt processing, leading to preliminary failure. This approach to architected blends that Dr. David Kazmer and I are taking will engineer materials with superior modulus, strength, and toughness. High performance blends can be achieved using multi-component melt streams and shape multiplying elements that can cut, stretch, and shape the flow to create specific cross-sectional geometry, control the orientation of the polymer chains, and induce crystalline structures for strength and toughness. The two polymers of focus are Liquid Crystal Polymers and Nylon 66. The ability for LCP to form stiff and strong fibrils is expected to stimulate the formation of crystallin morphologies in the Nylon 66, strengthening the architected blend. The characterization, modeling, and processing methods developed to study multilayer blends will be applied to design 2D architected blend produced by SMEs. For both 1D and 2D architected blends, I will: 1) model the development of the flow through the LMEs and SMEs, 2) characterize the final crystalline morphologies, domain structure, material properties, and deformation mechanism, 3) and investigate the failure mechanisms using micromechanical modeling. The outcomes will be fundamental understanding of the effects of local processing states on the structure and properties of architected blends and validated computational tools to design more complex SMEs and 2D architected blends.