Presidential Young Investigator Award

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The goal of this research is to examine the dynamics and flow behavior of Polymeric Liquid Crystals (PLCs) in terms of the underlying polymer and domain microstructure. PLCs are highly ordered polymer solutions and melts with useful anisotropic optical and mechanical properties strongly influenced by processing. This coupling between flow processing and the microstructure, which itself determines the final mechanical and optical properties, is to be elucidated and quantified. To better understand the relationships between the nonequilibrium microstructure and the macroscopic rheology in transient flows, three techniques will be used to examine and model the behavior of these complex fluids: (a) Rheometry; (b) Dichroism and birefringence; (c) Nonequilibrium molecular dynamic simulations on massive parallel computers, to model and understand the experiments. The dynamical behavior of PLC systems under transient flow is of interest in most PLC product fabrication processes.