CBE Seminar: Michael Howard, University of Texas

Assembling Colloidal Mixtures Into Functional Soft Materials

Soft materials like colloidal dispersions and polymer solutions are widespread in many fields ofscience and engineering, including biotechnology, consumer products, and advanced materials. Akey challenge for designing functional soft materials is to relate their controllable physicochemicalmakeup to their emergent macroscopic properties (e.g., structure, rheology), especially when theconditions for material processing or application are far from equilibrium. In this seminar, I willhighlight recent progress made toward solving this challenge for two types of materials, thin-filmcoatings and colloidal gels, using large-scale molecular simulations. I will first show how solvent borne multicomponent mixtures like paints or pesticides can, surprisingly, demix into two or morelayers during film drying through a purely nonequilibrium mechanism. The distribution ofcomponents in the demixed film depends sensitively on both the solute size and the dryingconditions, suggesting a general route to achieve complex structures by manipulating the soluteinteractions and film processing.

Biography 

Michael Howard is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He received a B.S.in Chemical Engineering from Penn State University in 2013 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineeringfrom Princeton University in 2018. He was awarded a National Defense Science and EngineeringGraduate Fellowship (2013), a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship(2013), and a Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship (2016) to support his research using multiscalemodels to study the structure and dynamics of colloid-polymer mixtures out of equilibrium.Michael’s current work focuses on the computational design of reconfigurable nanomaterials andwater-treatment membranes as part of the Center for Dynamics and Control of Materials and theCenter for Materials for Water and Energy Systems at UT Austin