MRI: Acquisition of Equipment for Thermal and Thermo-Mechanical Analysis of Soft Materials

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The objective is to establish thermal and thermo-mechanical materials analysis core facilities to facilitate research and education in soft materials. The proposed equipment includes dynamic mechanical, rheometric, thermo-gravimetric, and calorimetric analysis to fill voids in current analytical capabilities with respect to soft materials. Research in soft materials is ongoing in areas including biomacromolecules, biomaterials such as tissues, synthetic polymers, polymer-based nanocomposites, viscous liquids, liquid crystals, and gels. The equipment will increase the impact of existing programs in biotechnology and nanotechnology related to soft materials and expand opportunities for faculty and students to be educated in the methods of, and trained on, modern analytical instrumentation, so as to enable the pursuit of new research in soft matter. Through existing inter-departmental collaborations, we are positioned to make important contributions to the science and engineering of soft matter and the availability of this new equipment will greatly accelerate this impact. Emphasis on themes, such as interdisciplinary science and the science and engineering of scale, will be underscored by the use of this type of equipment. The equipment will be housed in a core facility in our Science and Technology Center and will be coordinated and managed through the Tufts University Bioengineering & Biotechnology Center. The facility will be run by Peggy Cebe (Professor, Dept. of Physics) who has extensive experience with this type of equipment for analysis of polymeric materials, and by David Kaplan (Director of the Bioengineering & Biotechnology Center) who has extensive experience with biologically derived soft materials. Undergraduate and graduate students will have opportunities to conduct research for credit using the equipment, and participate in summer programs and short courses in which the equipment will be featuredThe study of the influence of temperature on the structure and function of soft matter is an area of intensive interest related to new biomaterials, scaffolds for tissue engineering and new polymers for high performance material applications. The equipment requested will permit detailed quantitative assessments of the thermal behavior of these novel materials derived from or mimicked from biology. These new materials offer important lessons in green chemistry, new ways to use self-organizing concepts to form complex material systems, and the importance of interfaces between polymers and salts to improve mechanical properties and biological interfaces. The emphasis for these topics includes interdisciplinary science and the science and engineering of scale and the type of equipment requested will provide new insight into biotechnology and nanotechnology topics in the field of materials science and engineering of soft materials. The proposed equipment will support ongoing research efforts, while also providing improved opportunities for training and education of undergraduate, graduate, post doctoral fellow, faculty. The equipment will also provide opportunities with underrepresented groups of students that come for specialized summer programs, such as our existing research opportunities for deaf and hard of hearing students. In total, the broader impact is expected to be substantial due to the new options afforded across disciplines by the equipment to expand training and research in soft materials.