Engineering the Evaporation-Driven Assembly of Nanostructured Ceramics

We propose collaboration between Stephen Rankin of the University of Kentucky and a team of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, including Jeff Brinker, Frank van Swol, and Randy Schunk. We will investigate and develop computational models for the synthesis of porous metal oxides by evaporation-driven co-assembly with surfactants. This technology promises to be a low-cost route to hierarchically ordered materials with interesting combinations of chemical, catalytic, electronic, sensing, thermal, adsorption, and/or optical functions. Our models will be validated with in-situ probes of the state of the system.