Chemistry Seminar - Manipulating Polymer Properties Through Synthetic Design

Manipulating Polymer Properties Through Synthetic Design: CopolymerizationDr. Bryan BeckhamAssistant Professor, Department of Chemical EngineeringAuburn UniversityAbstract:Polymer materials are ubiquitous in our daily lives and lie at the heart of many of today’s advanced technologies from structural materials, to organic electronics and fuel cell membranes. A close inspection of our surroundings at any given time yields a wide variety of polymer materials that make life as we live it possible. Yet, there remains tremendous potential for improving our fundamental understanding of the interplay between polymer chemistry, polymer architecture and the resulting material properties and to thereby facilitate the design of new materials with tailored properties. One important polymer structural motif is copolymerization, or the polymerization of multiple monomers into the same polymer chain. Through precise control over the distribution of monomers along the polymer chain, a wide variety of polymer architectures (block, random, gradient etc.) can be achieved with consequently varying and tunable physical properties. This lecture will focus on some of the ways copolymerization behavior can be described mathematically, tuned, and leveraged to manipulate polymer physical properties. In particular, a newly developed non-terminal model of copolymerization kinetics will be described and computationally compared to traditional methods of characterizing copolymerization kinetics. Manipulation of the compositional drift profile in the anionic copolymerization of styrene and isoprene through reaction solvent composition will be demonstrated. And, lastly, the utility of copolymerization for tuning physical properties will be examined in the contexts of block copolymer self-assembly, semiconducting polymers, and ion-exchange membranes.Speaker Bio:Dr. Bryan S. Beckingham earned his B.S degree in Chemical Engineering from Clarkson University in 2007 and his Ph.D. degree in Chemical and Materials Engineering from Princeton University in 2013. Before joining the Department of Chemical Engineering at Auburn University as an Assistant Professor in 2016, Dr. Beckingham was a Materials Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a member of the Material Science Division and the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis. Dr. Beckingham is active in engineering education as a past invited participant of the National Academy of Engineering: Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium and is currently the vice-chair of the chemical engineering division of the ASEE Southeast region. Dr. Beckingham’s research group focuses on synthetic polymer chemistry and materials characterization to inform the design of novel polymer materials for target applications with particular emphasis on hierarchically structured matter, polymer membranes and semiconducting polymers. Personally, he loves to travel internationally, is an avid hiker and doesn’t miss western NY winters all that much.