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Materials Science and Engineering Seminar Series

Monday, February 3, 2020 at 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Kimball Hall, B11

"Disentangling the Design Space: Structure-Property Relationships for                                  Catalyst and Biomaterials Development"

                                                      Crystal Chu, PhD

Investigating the effects of systematic modifications to chemical structure enables the elucidation of structure-property relationships that govern molecular design. We first use this strategy to study ligand design for catalyst development. Olefin metathesis is a powerful and highly versatile reaction for the synthesis of both small molecules and polymers. In a series of aminophosphine-ligated ruthenium catalysts, P–N bonds were systematically incorporated into the ligand structure to evaluate the effect of these atomistic changes on catalyst activity. Combined analyses of kinetic and computational studies were used to deconvolute contributions from various ligand effects in promoting catalyst initiation. These changes to molecular structure reveal important structure-activity relationships for catalyst design. In the second part of this talk, we employ a related approach to establish design rules for a new polymer fiber production method, in which fibers are drawn from extensible fluids. Operating at room temperature and only requiring water as a solvent, this method provides an alternative strategy for the preparation of polymer fibers, which are important components in numerous materials including biological scaffolds. Dynamic covalent chemistry was explored for the preparation of the fluid precursors, and atomistic modifications to the polymers near the site of crosslinking were made to investigate the effect of molecular structure on mechanical properties of the materials. The resulting structure-property relationships provide important molecular design considerations for translating polymer chemistry to materials properties on macroscopic length scales. 

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Event Type

Seminar, Presentation, Symposium, Colloquium

Departments

Materials Science and Engineering

Website

https://www.mse.cornell.edu/events/ms...

Speaker

Crystal Chu

Speaker Affiliation

MIT

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