CASE/Carnegie National Professor of the Year
Adjunct Professor of Chemistry
I study nanoparticles and their assemblies in a variety of ways. First as a chemist (and with the help of my chemistry friends) I synthesize uniformly sized particles of gold, silver and a variety of other materials. I call these stoichiometric particle compounds because of their high degree of chemical uniformity and because they behave like normal molecular compounds in solutions and can be made to form crystalline superlattices, ordered arrays of nanoparticles. The solutions of these nanoparticles have thermally reversible aggregation phenomena along with nucleation and growth. In other work I study particles in aerosols, especially soot in flames. The soot particles irreversibly aggregate together to form fractals with a variety of fractal dimensions dependent on the scale of the aggregates. Some of these aerosols form gels in the gas phase—aerogelation—and these gels have extremely low densities, down to 2.5 mg/cc which is a world record. I have spent considerable effort studying the optical and mobility properties of fractal aggregates and the kinetics of their growth. I also spend a considerable amount of effort scattering light from these particulate systems, using both static and dynamic techniques. Thus I am concerned with the theory of light scattering, especially a physical understanding. I have spent some of my time developing a variety of methods for instruction mostly based on hands-on training for the students in studios, with some efforts to integrate historical and primary text readings into instruction.
Jessica Changstrom
Arjun Nepal
Jeff Powell
NIRT: Nanometer Stoichiometric Particle Compounds Solutions and Control of their Self-Assembly into the Condensed Phase, NSF, $1,200,000, October 2006 to October 2010, C.M. Sorensen (PI), C. Aakeroy, A. Chakrabarti, K. Klabunde, B. Law and X.M. Lin.
Nanomaterials for Indoor Air Quality, KSU Targeted Excellence, $650,000, 2007 to 2011, with several others.
Towards Simultaneous Single Particle Chemical and Optical Characterization: Development of a Multi-angle Optical Scattering Module for the Aerosol Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer”, DOE/SBIR, CoPI with S. G. Buckley, PI (Photon Machines, Inc.) and K. Prather (UCSD), April, 2010.
Characterization of Flow, PAX Scientific, $74,943, CoPI with M. Hosni (PI), S. Eckels and T. Beck. April 2010.
Nanoscale Molecules under Thermodynamic Control: ‘Digestive Ripening’ or ‘Nanomachining’”, DOE, $450,000, Klabunde (PI) and Sorensen, September 15, 2010 to September 14, 2013.
Caitin, Inc., 1003 Clegg Court, Petaluma, CA 94954, $429,610. Development of a water based, critical flow, non-vapor compression cooling cycle.” CoPI with M. Hosni (PI), S. Eckels and T. Beck. October 2010 to September 2012.