Dr. Joyjit Kundu's talk

Mar 19, 2019 - 17:00

Mar 19, 2019 - 18:00

Room 118, Chemical Engg Dept

Seminars

Dr. Joyjit Kundu, Duke University

Abstract: In this talk, I will start by outlining the different research themes that I have been working on. First, I am going to briefly summarize my contributions in understanding self-assembly of anisotropic objects into ordered structures and in bypassing dynamical sluggishness to access low temperature "glassy" states. Next, I will move on to the main part of my talk about the thermodynamics and kinetics of gas separation in some porous crystalline materials, namely Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). In particular, I am going to talk about the phenomenon of cooperative adsorption in MOFs that permits more efficient uptake and removal than does the more usual non-cooperative (Langmuir-type) adsorption. Usually, cooperativity, signaled by a step-like isotherm, is attributed to a phase transition of the framework. However, the class of metal-organic frameworks mmen-M2(dobpdc) exhibit cooperative adsorption of CO2 but show no evidence of a phase transition. Here we show how cooperativity emerges in the absence of a phase transition. We further establish the connection between thermodynamics and kinetics to explain the origin of (experimentally observed) hysteresis in these materials. Such an efficient equilibrium cooperative adsorption mechanism, however, can not be realized for all desired gas-framework combinations. Using a diffusion-binding simulation model and the emergent gas-separation mechanism, we explore the possibility of selective gas capture under nonequilibrium conditions.Bio: Joyjit Kundu is a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University in the Chemistry Department. He is broadly interested in understanding emergent phenomena in complex systems. In particular, he is interested in the statistical physics of soft matter systems (e.g., amorphous materials, liquid crystals, and self-assembled complex structures) and applications of statistical mechanics in solving real-world problems. Soon after schooling at his hometown Raiganj, he moved to Jadavpur University, Kolkata for his undergraduate studies and then to Chennai for Masters at IIT Madras. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), India, in 2015, for work focusing on equilibrium self-assembly of anisotropic particles. He then pursued postdoctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California (as a part of "Center for Gas Separations", University of California, Berkeley) studying gas capture and dynamics in porous materials as well as peptoid nanoscale self-assembly. Currently, at Duke, he works on disordered or glassy systems as a part of "Simons Collaboration on Cracking the Glass Problem".