The Center for Hierarchical Emergent Materials (CHEM) will couple academic researchers with expertise in chemical synthesis, rheology, morphology, simulation, and modeling; with industrial manufactures of paints, pigments, printed electronics, biomedical devices, consumer products, tires and elastomers to develop a new approach to the design, simulation, and modeling of emergent multi-hierarchical structures that impact engineered properties. Academic researchers have been adept at the construction of molecular to nanoscale architectures for targeted self-assembly. Industrial researchers, on the other hand, have been equally adept at the manipulation of manufacturing and application/use conditions to control emergent structures that govern features like gloss, haze, biocompatibility, electrical and ionic conductivity, and toughness in engineered materials like paint, reinforced elastomers, inks, healthcare products and plastics. An example might be phenomena that occur when paint is processed, stored, applied, and dried. During this process pigment nano-aggregates and agglomerates may breakup, reform, and finally produce an emergent network structure that spans atomic to macroscopic scales in a complex multi-structural hierarchy. Often the multi-hierarchies have time dependence to their structural maturation and performance, i.e. "4D materials". This is the case as an ink dries on paper developing a multi-hierarchical structure that interacts with light. Similar structural hierarchies are produced in tire manufacturing and lead to a dynamic hierarchy, coupled to the structural hierarchy, important to road performance. Such complex emergent systems can only be studied by a team of academic researchers in close interaction with their industrial partners who can take advantage of the technology which is developed. Finding parallel approaches in divergent fields, the center will leverage existing synthetic, processing and simulation approaches in application to new fields, for instance, taking advantage of knowledge or emergence of structure in reinforced elastomers to produce new nanocomposite solid electrolytes for lithium batteries. An undergraduate research program (REU) focusing on minorities, the handicapped, and women will be associated with the Center, with students integrated across the three campuses and industrial partners for research projects.
The goal of the Center for Hierarchical Materials (CHEM) is to address mostly chemical and biological products and processes where chemical and nanoscale manipulation and processing lead to the emergence of complex hierarchical structures with direct impact on performance. These products are extremely common across a range of industries, yet have not been studied in a coherent, interdisciplinary manner, making full use of technical and scientific expertise and advances. The scope of the center is in areas where rheology, structure, simulation, and modeling can yield insight and discovery for complex emergent structures such as in paint, inks, reinforced elastomers, complex personal health care products, polymer compounds, heterogeneous catalysts, and printed electronics to name a few areas. All of these areas rely on chemical and nano-scale engineering followed by processing that lead to the emergence of nano-to micron-scale multi-hierarchical structures tied directly to engineering properties. The impact of the center will be in new predictive simulations and models, new approaches garnered partly by borrowing concepts across the different disciplines of application, new products and processes that take advantage of scientific understanding of these dynamic emergent materials. The Center for Hierarchical Emergent Materials (CHEM) assembles a team of researchers from three universities, the University of Michigan, the University of Cincinnati and the University of Delaware. The center will be organized in three thrusts: I. Disordered Structural Hierarchies including reinforced elastomers, synthetic skin, and pigments; II. Ordered Structural Hierarchies including semi-crystalline materials and synthetic approaches to self-assembly; and III. Surfactants and Coacervates including worm-like micelles, coacervates, and biometric assembly.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
