ChEMS Seminar: Interfacial Engineering with Nanoparticulate Polymer Brushes

Abstract: In recent years, researchers have been inspired to develop novel boundary lubrication strategies that mimic the complex glycoproteins deployed as joint lubricants by the human body. An important characteristic of these natural lubricating polymers is that they have a structure resembling a bottlebrush, with hydrophilic chains extending outward from a long central chain, like soft bristles on a brush. We have been developing different types of surface active synthetic nanoparticulate polymer brushes that can be adsorbed from liquid suspension onto surfaces and used for boundary lubrication. Moreover, by incorporating environmentally responsive segments into the brushes, it is possible to switch the interaction between coated surfaces from lubricious to adhesive on demand. Some of the same materials that demonstrate these lubrication characteristics are also extremely efficient oil/water emulsifiers. Accordingly, in our view, nanoparticulate polymer brushes represent a promising new class of “surfactant” for a potentially broad range of interfacial engineering applications. This motivates fundamental investigations of their interfacial activity. This presentation will explore lubrication and emulsification performance characteristics of nanoparticulate polymer brushes as well as the fundamental phenomena that we hypothesize are responsible for those characteristics.

Bio: Robert Tilton is a professor of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.  He earned degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware (B.Ch.E., 1986) and Stanford University (M.S., 1987, Ph.D., 1991) and conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute for Surface Chemistry and the Royal Institute of Technology Chemistry Department in Stockholm. His research addresses adsorption, self-assembly and nanoscale interaction processes that control multicomponent complex fluid and colloidal systems, including applications in industrial, biological and environmental settings. Tilton is a fellow of the American Chemical Society and of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and an editor of Colloids and Surfaces A: Physicochemical and Engineering Aspects..

Host: Szu-Wen Wang