Millennium Café

Size and shape are important properties of particulate samples. These can influence a wide range of characteristics, such as: texture and feel of food ingredients, flowability of metal powders, and packing density/porosity of ceramics, to name a few. This talk will highlight capabilities and applications of two new particle characterization instruments currently available at Materials Characterization Lab, the Mastersizer 3000 for measuring particle size distribution and the Morphologi G3 SE for imaging size and shape of individual particle.

Katya Bazileskaya | Materials Characterization Lab

The primary objective of the NASA Mars Science Laboratory Mission is to investigate the potential habitability of ancient Mars. During this mission, the Curiosity Rover has traversed hundreds of meters of mudstone representing a long-lived series of ancient lakes. Characteristics of the sandstone and conglomerate deposits studied along the traverse indicate that those lakes were sustained by rivers and deltas. Additionally, the mission has found extensive evidence for water having flowed through fractures in the bedrock at a later time of Martian history. Further, the preserved rocks, and their associated minerals, show considerable evidence for different reduction/oxidation states, an important prerequisite for habitability.

Chris House | Geosciences

Punishment, or the threat of punishment, is a critical component for the establishment and maintenance of social system governed by norms. We would like to create robots that obey social norms. Do we then need a means for punishing our robots and, if so, how do punish a robot? This talk examines these and related questions.

Alan Wagner | Rock Ethics Institute | Aerospace Engineering

Poor understanding of heat transfer across solid-liquid interfaces bottlenecks the development of nanocomposite materials for applications in thermal interface materials, energy generation, catalysis, and thermotherapeutics. Thermal engineers have identified the main parameters governing interfacial heat transfer; however, the interplay among these parameters is rather complex. This talk calls for anybody interested in the topic to develop a proper understanding of interfaces before addressing the problem of heat transfer across interfaces.

Every year the world produces more trash and demands more energy. While the integrated biorefinery could produce renewable fuels from waste, its economic viability hinges on the ability to upgrade the unstable bio-oils currently produced, and to develop high-value byproducts. In a new approach to the integrated biorefinery, we incorporate inorganic compounds into cellulosic feedstocks to engineer solid products such as nanomaterials via biotemplating, heterogeneous adsorbents, and tunable carbon electrode materials, while simultaneously upgrading biofuels. This reduces the need for downstream upgrading and improves the economic viability of sustainable biomass to renewable fuel conversions.

Jillian Goldfarb | Energy and Mineral Engineering

Supramolecular chemistry is a strategy to engineer materials through directional noncovalent interactions (e.g., hydrogen bonds, host-guest interactions, metal coordination). Despite the dynamic and reversible nature of supramolecular interactions, their full integration into synthetic materials design platforms is sluggish. Nature, however, fabricates some of the most beautiful 1D, 2D, and 3D self-assembled architectures using a combined array of complex synthetic techniques and exploitation of noncovalent chemistry. So the question arises… why can’t we do the same to control molecular architecture?

Elizabeth Elacqua