U.S.-Turkey Cooperative Research: Development of Environmentally Benign Processes for the Fabrication of Self-Cleaning and Self-Healing Surfaces

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0422896 WuDescription: This project supports a cooperative project between a US team, led by Professor Jianzhong Wu, Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering University of California, Riverside, California and a Turkish team led by Professor Husnu Yildirim Erbil, Department of Chemistry, Kocaeli University, Turkey. The research objective is to develop environmentally friendly processes for the large-scale fabrications of superhydrophobic surfaces that promise numerous commercial and military applications. The teams will study the detailed schemes for the preparations of nanoscale superhydrophobic particles in supercritical carbon dioxide and the assembly of these particles at various surfaces. The U.S. team will perform molecular modeling and simulations to investigate the microscopic details of particles formation and self-assembly and give a recommendation for the design and optimization of experimental systems. Concurrently, the PI and his colleagues from the Turkish team will synthesize fluorinated polymers for the formation of nanoparticles in CO2 and perform experiments to validate the theoretical predictions, to fabricate the surfaces following the theoretical design, and to characterize and test the performance of expected surfaces. It is likely that this project will lead to significant advances in the area of superhydrophobic surfaces, and to interesting new methods for fabricating them. The collaboration is between two teams with complementary qualifications and institutional facilities, as the U.S. PI has strong experience in theoretical modeling, and the Turkish team has extensive experience on the synthesis of superhydrophobic surfaces. Scope and broader impacts: There is widespread use of carcinogenic organic solvents, which find their way into the water table, in industrial and chemical applications, and these need to be replaced. Supercritical carbon dioxide is a benign solvent that may be a right replacement, as it find its way into more wide spread use. U.S. graduate students will gain international experience by working in the foreign institution, and by working with foreign graduate students, and will be involved in both theoretical and experimental research. This project is funded jointly by OISE and the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems.