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RAP opportunity at National Institute of Standards and Technology     NIST

Shear Induced Structures in Colloidal Systems

Location

NIST Center for Neutron Research

opportunity location
50.61.01.C0423 Gaithersburg, MD

NIST only participates in the February and August reviews.

Advisers

name email phone
Yun Liu yun.liu@nist.gov 301.975.6235

Description

A fundamental mechanistic understanding of material responses to flow fields is critical for many industrial applications, such as painting, drug delivery through thin needles, and 3D printing. Further, by controlling the flow conditions, different type of materials structures can be formed or tuned. These macroscopic responses are directly related to the microscopic structure in these complex fluids. We are currently particularly interested in 1) developing and/or applying rheological theories to model complex fluid systems, in particular for the analysis of their two-dimensional SAS patterns, to gain fundamental understanding of the relationship between structure and rheological response; and 2) utilizing shearing force to control or tune colloidal self-assembly for novel applications.

Small angle scattering (SAS) and particularly neutron scattering (SANS) has proven to be a powerful technique for probing the structures of complex fluids at the length scale from about one nanometer to hundreds of nanometers and the NIST Center for Neutron Research has a long history of studying shear induced structures.  Over the past decade, the facility has built up a robust suite of RheoSANS (combining simultaneous rheology measurements with the SANS structural analysis) and FlowSANS capabilities allowing the probing of structures in all 3 planes of shear, in a variety of shear types (steady or oscillatory, shear or extensional etc.) and rates, and doing so in both a spatially and temporally resolved fashion.

Using these latest, state of the art capabilities, along with more traditional techniques such as light scattering, we are developing a program to take a fresh look at a variety of complex fluids known to be altered by shear, particularly those that exhibit shear-induced transitions of various descriptions.

key words
shear; colloid; small angle scattering; structure; rheology; neutron

Eligibility

Citizenship:  Open to U.S. citizens
Level:  Open to Postdoctoral applicants

Stipend

Base Stipend Travel Allotment Supplementation
$82,764.00 $3,000.00
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