Research Areas

People Rice University on Facebook Rice University on Linkedin Rice University on Envelope Matteo Pasquali Matteo Pasquali A. J. Hartsook Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering; Professor of Chemistry and MSNE 229 Keck Hall 713-348-5830 mp@rice.edu Pasquali Research Group Google Scholar General Research Area: Materials by Chemical Design Research Discipline: Theory & Computation Nanomaterial Synthesis Research Summary: The unifying research theme of the cf2 group, led by Prof. Matteo Pasquali, is the interaction of flow and liquid micro- and nano-structure. Most engineered materials are formed and/or processed in the liquid state; they are complex fluids because they possess intrinsic length scales that are well-separated from the macroscopic length scales of the process (usually tens of micrometers to meters) and the nanoscopic length scales of the solvent (usually smaller than one nanometer). For example, in polymer solutions and melts the intrinsic length scale is the length of the polymer (usually hundreds of nanometers to few micrometers), which is well separated from the finer length scales (solvent diameter in solution, polymer diameter in melts). The large scale microstructural features relax on timescales that overlap the flow time scales; thus, the dynamic morphology can differ dramatically from the equilibrium one, and this changing morphology affects the flow and produced intriguing nonlinear dynamical phenomena that are not observed in flowing liquids of low-molecular weight.