Capacitors | Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State

Evangelos Manias

Evangelos Manias
Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
325-D Steidle Building
(814) 863-2980
manias@matse.psu.edu
http://zeus.plmsc.psu.edu/

Biographical Sketch:

Professor Manias received his B.S. degree in Physics from the Aristotle U in Thessaloniki, Greece, and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from U. of Groningen, the Netherlands. He subsequently carried out postdoctoral research in the Materials Science and Engineering department at Cornell U, before joining Penn State as an assistant professor in 1998. His research combines theoretical, simulation, and experimental approaches focused on explaining how nanoscale structures affect the macroscopic materials properties in multi-phase polymer systems, and on further designing appropriate structures and functionalities that lead to high-performance novel materials.

Research Interests:

Polymer/Inorganic nanocomposite materials
Polymers at surfaces, interfaces, and confinements; structure and dynamics of nano-confined polymers
Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) studies of polymer surfaces
Smart/Responsive polymers and soft-condensed matter systems

Areas of Research:

Professor Manias’ research focuses on the development of new high performance polymer and polymer-composite materials, with approaches spanning the range from basic-science fundamentals to engineering development of materials designed for specific applications. All of these research efforts exploit the unique opportunities of nanoscale structures and nanoscopic components in polymer and organic materials.
More specifically, examples of recent work in Professor Manias’ research group include: (a) development of high performance polymer/inorganic nanocomposites, involving synthesis, processing, fundamental physics, and engineering design approaches; (b) atomic force microscopy (AFM) studies of polymer surfaces and polymer nanostructures, including he development of new state-of-the-art instruments and modifications of AFM modes of operation; (c) fundamental understanding of nanoscopically confined polymer electrolytes and lubricants, based on molecular modeling; and (d) design and syntheses of smart polymers that respond to external stimuli –such as temperature, electric fields, and pH– and applications of these smart materials in biomedical and surface applications.
A unique feature of Manias’ research group approach in its investigations is the concurrent in-depth employment of polymer physics, molecular modeling computer simulations, synthetic chemistry, and engineering approaches –design, processing, characterization, structure-property relations, and application-driven materials development. The feedback and cross-fertilization between fundamental science, computer modeling, and engineering approaches offers unprecedented opportunities for fast progress in research, and to date has yielded diverse results that were featured in eminent scientific journals of physics, polymers, and engineering, new technologies that were patented, and new advances in materials that were featured in popularized-science books and magazines.

Technology Impacted By Research:

Polymer nanocomposites for structural, barrier, packaging, fire resistance, and biomedical applications
Smart polymers for microfluidics, smart-surfaces, biomedical, biological, and for biodetection and toxic removal
Molecular modeling for technologies related to lubrication, advanced polymer electrolytes, and fuel cells
Advanced packaging, defense-related composites, fuel cell membranes.

Journal Articles and Publications:

Full list of publications (up to date, incl. full-text where allowed)

"Nanocomposites: Stiffer by Design", E. Manias, Nature Materials, 6, 9-11 (2007)
"Nested self-similar wrinkling patterns in skins", K. Efimenko, M. Rackaitis, E. Manias, A. Vaziri, L. Mahadevan, J. Genzer, Nature Materials, 4, 293-297 (2005)
"Polymerically modified layered silicates: An effective route to nanocomposites", J. Zhang, E. Manias, C.A. Wilkie, J. Nanoscience & Nanotechnology, 8, 1597-1615 (2008)
"Simulation insights on the structure of nanoscopically confined poly(ethylene oxide)", V. Kuppa, S. Menakanit, R. Krishnamoorti, and E. Manias, J. Polym. Sci. B: Polym. Phys. 41, 3285-3298 (2003)
"Polypropylene/Montmorillonite Nanocomposites: A Review of Synthetic Routes and Materials Properties", E. Manias, A. Touny, L. Wu, K. Strawhecker, B. Lu, T.C. Chung, Chemistry of Materials, 13, 3516-3523 (2001)

ResearcherID (A-7557-2011)

Manias

T.C. Mike Chung

T. C. Mike Chung
Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
325 Steidle Bldg.
(814) 863-1394
chung@matse.psu.edu

Biographical Sketch:

Professor Chung obtained his B. S. in Chemistry from Chung Yuan University (Taiwan) in 1976. He came to the U. S. for his graduate study in the Department of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania in 1979. After finishing his Ph.D work in 1982 on conducting polymers (with Professor A. J. MacDiarmid, Nobel Laureate), he spend two years as a Research Scientist at Institute for polymers and Organic Solids (with Professor Alan J. Heeger, Nobel Laureate), University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 1984 and 1989, he was a Senior Research Staff in Corporate Research, Exxon Company. In 1989 he joined the faculty of the Pennsylvania State University as an associate professor and became professor of Polymer Science in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in 1993. He is author of about 200 professional publications, including 2 books and 45 U.S. patents.

Research Interests:

Functionalization of polyolefins via the combination of metallocene catalysts and reactive chain transfer agents
Functionalization of fluoropolymers using borane-mediated radical polymerization
Living radical polymerization based on new borane/oxygen initiators
Energy storage via polymer thin film capacitors with high energy density, high power density, and low loss.
Polyolefin-based ion conductors for fuel cells, batteries, electrodialysis, etc.
Oil super-absorbent polymers (oil-SAP) for oil spill recovery and natural gas storage
B/C/M graphitic materials for hydrogen storage

Areas of Research:

Professor Chung is interested in the development of new polymer chemistry that can lead to new materials with unique chemical and physical properties for applications. In his recent research activities, he has been focusing on the technologies relative to energy and environmental issues. Several current research projects include (a) functionalization of polyolefins (PE, PP, EP, etc.) via the combination of metallocene catalysts and reactive comonomers and chain transfer agents to prepare polyolefins containing side-chain or chain-end functional groups, (b) synthesis of long chain branched polyolefin, including i-PP and s-PS, and studying their thin film processing, (c) studying control radical polymerization based on new functional borane/oxygen initiators to prepare functional fluoropolymers, (d) developing new energy storage technology on the polymer thin film capacitors with high energy density, high power density, and low loss, (e) studying new polyolefin-based ion conductors that show high ion conductivity, good fuel selectivity, long term stability, and cost effective, (f) investigating new polyolefin-based oil superabsorbent (oil-SAP) for oil spill recovery, (g) synthesizing boron substituted carbon (B/C) materials and doped derivatives for hydrogen storage. My group at Penn State is recognized as a leading research group in the functionalization of polyolefin and fluoropolymers with more than 180 papers and 50 US and international patents published in the past 20 years.

Technology Impacted By Research:

In light of the 2010 BP disaster in Gulf of Mexico and the 2011 Exxon oil spill in Yellowstone river, showing no effective technology for recovering oil spills and preventing pollution in the air and water, we have recently developed a new polyolefin-based oil super-absorbent polymer (oil-SAP) that exhibits high oil absorption capability (up to 50 times of its weight), fast kinetics, easy recovery from water surface, and no water absorption. The recovered oil/oil-SAP solid is suitable for regular refining process (no pollutants and no wastes). This cost effective new oil-SAP technology shall dramatically reduce the environmental impacts from oil spills and recover most of precious natural resource.

Journal Articles and Publications:

"Functionalization of Polyolefins", T. C. Chung, Academic Press, London, 2002
Synthesis of Functional Polyolefin Copolymers with Graft and Block Structures, T. C. Chung, Progress in Polymer Science 2002, 27, 39.
Ferroelectric Polymers with Giant Electrostriction; Based on Semicrystalline VDF/TrFE/CTFE Terpolymers, T. C. Chung and A. Petchsuk, Ferroelectrics Letters 2001, 28, 135.
Exfoliated PP/Clay Nanocomposites Using Ammonium-Terminated PP as the Organic Modification Montmorillonite, Z. M. Wang, H. Nakajima, E. Manias, and T. C. Chung, Macromolecules 2003, 36, 8919.
Reaction Mechanism of Borane/Oxygen Radical Initiators During the Polymerization of Fluoromonomers, Zhi-cheng Zhang and T. C. Mike Chung, Macromolecules 2006, 39, 5187.
Synthesis and Characterization of Long Chain Branched Isotactic Polypropylene (LCBPP) via Metallocene Catalyst and T-reagent, J. A. Langston, R. H. Colby, F. Shimizu, T. Suzuki, M. Aoki, T. C. Mike Chung, Macromolecules 2007, 40, 2712.
Fluoro-terpolymer Based Capacitors Having High Energy Density, Low Energy Loss, and High Pulsed Charge-discharge Cycles, Zhicheng Zhang, and T. C. Mike Chung, Macromolecules 2007, 40, 783.
Synthesis of Boron-Substituted Carbon (B/C) Materials Using Polymeric Precursors and Evaluation for Hydrogen Physisorption, Youmi Jeong, Alfred Kleinhammes, Yue Wu, and T. C. Mike Chung, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2008, 130, 6668.
Super-activated Carbon Containing Substitutional Boron (BC_x): Synthesis, Characterization, and Applications in Hydrogen Storage, Youmi Jeong and T. C. Mike Chung, Carbon 2010, 48, 2526.
Synthesis of Functionalized Isotactic Polypropylene Dielectrics for Electric Storage Application, Xuepei Yuan, Yuichi Matsuyama, and T.C. Mike Chung, Macromolecules 2010, 43, 4011.

Chung

Long-Qing Chen

Long-Qing Chen
Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
Materials Research Institute
N-321 Millennium Science Complex
(814) 863-8101
chen@matse.psu.edu
http://www.ems.psu.edu/~chen/

Biographical Sketch:

Long-Qing Chen is Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at the Pennsylvania State University. He is a short-term visiting Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Tsinghua University under the short-term 1000-Scholar program, a guest Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University, and a guest Professor of Physics at the Beijing University of Science and Technology in China. He received his B.S. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University in China in 1982. After spending one year as an assistant instructor at Zhejiang University, he came to the United States in 1983 and received his M.S. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1985 and a Ph.D. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1990. After a two-year post-doc appointment with Professor Armen G. Khachaturyanat Rutgers University, he joined the faculty at Penn State as an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in 1992. He was promoted to Associated Professor in 1998 and Professor in 2002. Professor Chen teaches undergraduate thermodynamics of materials and graduate kinetics of materials processes and also co-teaches one graduate course and one undergraduate course in computational materials science in the department. Professor Chen's main research interest is developing multiscale computational models for predicting microstructure evolution in materials using a combination of atomistic/first-principles calculations and phase-field methods. In particular, he is interested in microstructure evolution during phase transformations, grain growth, Ostwald ripening, ferroelectric and multiferroic domain switching, and coupled ionic/electronic transport in electrochemical systems. His research group collaborates actively with numerous experimental groups, applied mathematicians, and other fellow computational materials scientists and physicists as well as with more than a dozen companies and national labs. Professor Chen has published over 350 authored or co-authored papers (H-index = 51, Number of Citations >10,000), 1 patent licensed by Intel, and co-edited 3 books in the area of computational materials science of microstructures and properties. He has given more than 200 invited talks including 6 at the Gordon Research Conferences. Professor Chen's current and former graduate students have received more than 40 awards including Materials Research Society Graduate Student Gold and Silver Medal Awards, American Ceramic Society Graduate Excellence in Materials Science Awards, Acta Materialia best student paper award, Penn State Materials Research Institute best Ph.D. thesis research award, TMS Young Leader Award, etc. Professor Chen received numerous awards for his work including:

ONR Young Investigator Award (1995)
NSF special research creativity award (1999)
Wilson Award for Excellence in Research from his college (2000)
University Faculty Scholar Medal in Engineering at Penn State (2003)
Outstanding Overseas Young Scholar by the Chinese Natural Science Foundation (2004)
Changjiang Chair Professorship by the Chinese Ministry of Education (2004)
Guest Professor at Beijing University of Science and Technology (2004)
Guggenheim Fellow (2005)
Royal Society Kan Tong Po Fellowship at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (2005)
ASM Materials Research Silver Medal (2006)
American Physical Society Fellow (2008)
D. B. Robinson Distinguished Lecture at University of Alberta (2010)
Materials Science and Engineering Departmental Teaching Award of Students’ Choice (2010)
TMS EMPMD Distinguished Scientist/Engineer Award (2011)
Short-Term 1000-Talent Program Visiting Professorship at Tsinghua University (2011)
Bo Yugang Visiting Professorship at Zhejiang University (2012)
ASM Fellow (2012)
Penn State Distinguished Professorship (2013)
Materials Research Society (MRS) Fellow (2013)

Research Interests:

Computational materials science
Phase-field method
Multiscale modeling of microstructure evolution integrating first-principles calculations, and phase-field methods, and microstructure-property relationships
Phase transformations
Deformation twinning
Microstructure coarsening
Structural alloys (Ti-alloys, Ni-alloys, Al-alloys and Mg-alloys)
Domain structures in ferroelectric and magnetic materials, multiferroics
Electrochemical transport in dielectrics, batteries and solid oxide fuel cells.

Areas of Research:

Dr. Chen’s main research interest is in the fundamental understanding of the thermodynamics and kinetics of phase transformations and mesoscale microstructure evolution in bulk solid and thin films using computer simulations. Essentially all engineering materials contain certain types of microstructures, and our success of designing new materials is largely dependent on our ability to control them. Microstructure is a general term that refers to a spatial distribution of structural features that can be phases of different compositions and/or crystal structures, or grains of different orientations, or domains of different structural variants, or domains of different electrical or magnetic polarization, as well as structural defects such as dislocations. It is the size, shape, and spatial arrangement of the local structural features that determine the physical properties of a material such as mechanical, electrical, magnetic and optical properties. For the last decade, Dr. Chen’s group at Penn State is particularly active in developing phase-field models for microstructure evolution during various materials processes including grain growth, coherent precipitation, ferroelectric domain formation, particle coarsening, domain structure evolution in thin films, phase transformation in the presence of structural defects, and effect of stress on microstructure evolution. Current research focus is on the effect of stress/strain on ferroelectric phase transitions and domain structure evolution in ferroelectric and multiferroic thin films, domain structures in ferromagnetic shape memory alloys, electrode microstructure evolution in solid oxide fuel cells and batteries, precipitate microstructure evolution in Al-, Mg-, Ti- and Ni-alloys, strain-dominated morphological evolution, effect of defects such as dislocations on microstructure evolution. Dr. Chen’s group collaborates extensively with experimentalists and with industry.

Technology Impacted By Research:

Alloy development for aerospace and automobile iapplications
Ferroelectric and ferromagnetic thin films for memory, capacitor and electromechanical system applications
Solid oxide fuel cells and batteries

Journal Articles and Publications:

N. Balke, B. Winchester, W. Ren, Y. H. Chu, A. N. Morozovska, E. A. Eliseev, M. Huijben, R. K. Vasudevan, P. Maksymovych, J. Britson, S. Jesse, I. Kornev, R. Ramesh, L. Bellaiche, L. Q. Chen, and S. V. Kalinin, Enhanced electric conductivity at ferroelectric vortex cores in BiFeO3, Nature Physics, 2012. 8():p. 81-88
L.Y. Liang, Y. Qi, F. Xue, S. Bhattacharya, S.J. Harris, and L.Q. Chen, Nonlinear phase-field model for electrode-electrolyte interface evolution. Physical Review E, 2012. 86(5).
K. Chang, C.E. Krill, Q. Du, and L.Q. Chen, Evaluating microstructural parameters of three-dimensional grains generated by phase-field simulation or other voxel-based techniques. Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering, 2012. 20(7).
B.S. Fromm, K. Chang, D.L. Mcdowell, L.Q. Chen, and H. Garmestani, Linking phase-field and finite-element modeling for process structure property relations of a Ni-base superalloy. Acta Materialia, 2012. 60(17): p. 5984-5999.
24. Y.H. Wen, L.Q. Chen, and J.A. Hawk, Phase-field modeling of corrosion kinetics under dual-oxidants. Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering, 2012. 20(3).
H. Yang, S. Huang, X. Huang, F.F. Fan, W.T. Liang, X.H. Liu, L.Q. Chen, J.Y. Huang, J. Li, T. Zhu, and S.L. Zhang, Orientation-Dependent Interfacial Mobility Governs the Anisotropic Swelling in Lithiated Silicon Nanowires. Nano Letters, 2012. 12(4): p. 1953-1958.
J. M. Hu, Z. Li, L. Q. Chen, and C. W. Nan, High-density magnetoresistive random access memory operating at ultralow voltage at room temperature , Nature Communications, 2011. 2:Art. No. 553
T. W. Heo, S. Bhattacharyya, and L.Q. Chen, A phase field study of strain energy effects on solute-grain boundary interactions. Acta Materialia, 2011. 59(20): p. 7800-7815.
C. T. Nelson, B. Winchester, Y. Zhang, S.J. Kim, A. Melville, C. Adamo, C.M. Folkman, S.H. Baek, C.B. Eom, D.G. Schlom, L.Q. Chen, and X.Q. Pan, Spontaneous Vortex Nanodomain Arrays at Ferroelectric Heterointerfaces. Nano Letters, 2011. 11(2): p. 828-834.
S.H. Baek, H.W. Jang, C.M. Folkman, Y.L. Li, B. Winchester, J.X. Zhang, Q. He, Y.H. Chu, C.T. Nelson, M.S. Rzchowski, X.Q. Pan, R. Ramesh, L.Q. Chen, and C.B. Eom, Ferroelastic switching for nanoscale non-volatile magnetoelectric devices. Nature Materials, 2010. 9(4): p. 309-314.
R. J. Zeches, M.D. Rossell, J.X. Zhang, A.J. Hatt, Q. He, C.H. Yang, A. Kumar, C.H. Wang, A. Melville, C. Adamo, G. Sheng, Y.H. Chu, J.F. Ihlefeld, R. Erni, C. Ederer, V. Gopalan, L.Q. Chen, D.G. Schlom, N.A. Spaldin, L.W. Martin, and R. Ramesh, A Strain-Driven Morphotropic Phase Boundary in BiFeO3. Science, 2009. 326(5955): p. 977-980.
L. Q. Chen, Phase-field method of phase transitions/domain structures in ferroelectric thin films: A review. Journal of the American Ceramic Society, 2008. 91(6): p. 1835-1844.
D. G. Schlom, L.Q. Chen, C.B. Eom, K.M. Rabe, S.K. Streiffer, and J.M. Triscone, Strain tuning of ferroelectric thin films. Annual Review of Materials Research, 2007. 37: p. 589-626.
V. Vaithyanathan, C. Wolverton, and L.Q. Chen, Multiscale modeling of precipitate microstructure evolution. Physical Review Letters, 2002. 88(12).
L. Q. Chen, Phase-field models for microstructure evolution. Annual Review of Materials Research, 2002. 32: p. 113-140.

Chen