This three-year award for U.S.-Switzerland cooperative research and education provides U.S. graduate students with the opportunity to gain international and interdisciplinary research experiences. The investigation of inorganic glass-polymer hybrid materials involves Professor Joshua Otaigbe and his graduate students at the School of Polymers and High Performance Materials, University of Southern Mississippi and Professor Hans Christian Ottinger and his group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Inorganic glass-polymer hybrid materials of this proposal belong to a relatively new class of advanced materials. Among their enhanced solid-state properties are increased toughness, high stiffness and strength, flame resistance.
Intellectual Merit
The goal of this international collaborative effort is to understand the basic physics governing the thermodynamic behavior and microstructure formation of inorganic-phosphate glass-organic polymer hybrids. The investigators propose to learn how to control the processing of the raw phosphate glass and organic polymer into affordable, structural parts, and to identify the technological potential of this class of hybrid composites. The modeling approach in this proposal could lead to processing/structure/property maps for this family of materials and may reduce or eliminate costly "trial and error" practice that is common in industry. This is a first step toward establishing rational design principles to guide the synthesis and processing of new engineering of the new hybrid systems.
Broader Impacts
The proposed project will provide research training to graduate students and advance their careers through new connections to leading European researchers. Students will experience how fundamental interdisciplinary knowledge is linked to solving a practical problem. The project also takes advance of complementary expertise and excellent research resources at ETH Zurich. The Swiss group is expert in the rheology, thermodynamics, and computational simulations of polymeric fluids. They have pioneered a number of theoretical models, numerical tools and novel rheometers. The research has additional potential for identifying new applications for inorganic glass-polymer hybrid materials. They could be used as solid electrolytes in solid-state batteries or polymer electrolyte membranes for fuel cells or as storage materials for nuclear wastes.
