Colloidal and nanoparticle gels, flocculated suspensions, and glasses are of fundamental scientific interest and pose challenges to industrial formulation and application because of the hierarchy of structures that connect particle properties to bulk material properties, and because structures on various length scales are affected by the processing and handling history, as well as the end use of the material. Goals of this project include:

1.  Identifying the mesoscale structures (hierarchical) that quantitatively relate the state of the suspension to interparticle potential and particle properties.

2. Indentifying and model aging and thixotropy in gels, glasses, and flocculated suspensions in terms of microstructure and particle properties.

3. Investigating mechanisms of shear thickening in structured particle suspensions.

My research is aimed at uncovering factors that affect the system aggregation as well as glass-gel transition. We hope to achieve this goal by various techniques such as light and small angle neutron scattering, rheology, electron microscopy and colloid synthesis. With the methods, the phase will be analyzed from a thermodynamic, mathematical, and rheological point of view to deduce fundamental understandings, which will serve as a basis for industrial application.