Multi-scale modeling of porous materials (29/05/23)

Speaker & Affiliation:

Prof. Dilip Gersappe
Chair, Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, Stony Brook University, NY. USA

When ?

29th May, 2023 (Monday), 3.30 pm (IST)

Venue

KPA Auditorium, Department of Materials Engineering

Abstract:

Porous materials are one of the most widely used materials in engineering applications, ranging from use in soil amendments, catalysis and energy storage. The use of such materials has been accelerated due to the development of nanotechnology, as we are now able to fabricate and tune the pore size of several substances upto the nanoscale. While experimental techniques to fabricate such materials has advanced significantly, given the range of parameters involved, in order to design such materials for specific applications, theory and simulation are required. In this talk, I present some recent work where we use computer simulations to track and understand the fundamental mechanisms that happen in porous systems, both from an equilibrium and a non-equilibrium point of view. The first system that I will present is a recent application where polymer hydrogels are used in geotechnical applications to improve the freeze-thaw cycle on the strength of soils. Here, both the assembly and the dynamics of the hydrogel/pore fluid will be examined and we will present simulations to study the freezing of water in porous structures. In the second example, I will look at how porosity controls charge storage and transport in graphite anodes used in Lithium ion batteries. Our simulations will be used to study the effect of the topology of the material in determining its effectiveness. In all these cases, our simulations will attempt to extract critical parameters that control the final properties of the system, so that we can use these simulations as guides to future experimental studies.

About Speaker:

Dilip Gersappe is a Professor and the current Chair of the MSCE program. He received his undergraduate in Metallurgy and Materials Science from IIT, Bombay and his PhD from Northwestern University, Dept of Materials Science and Engineering. He was a postdoc at the Univ of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins University. Since joining Stony Brook, he has been part of a NSF MRSEC and has led a NSF-funded Nanoscale Integrated Research Team (NIRT) and more recently part of the academic research team for the NY Climate Exchange. He has been a Visiting Professor at National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University.  His current research focuses on the use and development of computational models to study transport and non-equilibrium phenomena in complex fluid systems. His work has been widely cited and featured in Nature Nanozone, Physics Today and the Materials Research Bulletin.