Chemistry Colloquium: Dr. Vivek Prabhu

The Department of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to welcome Dr. Vivek Prabhu, a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The seminar will be held on Zoom. Please email kldalzel@syr.edu for Zoom info.

Title: Characterization challenges in soft materials: polyolefins, polyelectrolytes and carbon nanotubes

Abstract

The Polymers and Complex Fluids group develops measurement methods, models, data, and standards for soft materials, such as multi-phase fluids and gels, and their constituent components, such as polymers, nanoparticles, and colloids. This talk will briefly highlight our group that focuses on polyolefin separations and molar mass characterization for standards and emerging needs in circular economy and ocean plastics characterization, carbon nanotube separations science that enables applications of their intrinsic semiconducting properties, and microfluidic approaches to characterize rheology of complex fluids. The majority of the time will focus on the fundamentals of water soluble and ion-containing polymers. We will cover recent progress in characterizing associative phase separation of synthetic polyelectrolytes that exhibit lower critical solution phase behavior. While quite common in hydrogen bonding polymer solutions, this electrostatic driven phase separation exhibits unique properties including ultralow interfacial tension with fundamentals that remarkably are similar to membraneless organelles.