One of the major goals of sustainability is to use materials optimally. Pushing the envelope of materials performance, to design materials to be more functional and, easier to recycle and reuse is the underlying theme of our research. Our group develops an understanding of how microstructure evolves in soft materials and relates structure to properties to engineer materials.
Soft matter impacts every aspect of our day-to-day life. We encounter such materials in the form of plastic bags, toothpaste and shaving foam, LCs in LCD screens, automotive lubricants, “slimy” biological materials, etc. This class of materials includes polymers, composites, colloids, liquid crystals, viz. all materials where structure is determined though a large number of weak interactions. A delicate interplay of entropy of energetic interactions determines the structure of soft matter. Thus, our research cuts across the chemistry and physics of materials to engineer them for performance.
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Research Areas
- The main theme that underlies the various research problems that my group works on, is to develop an understanding of how microstructure evolves in soft materials, to relate structure to properties; and to use this understanding to engineer application-specific structure. The term “soft materials” encompasses a wide range of technologically important materials, including polymers, colloidal dispersions, surfactants/lipids, liquid crystals and gels, whose structure and functionality are determined by a large number of weak interactions. Equilibrium, metastable and unstable non-…