U.S.-Germany Cooperative Research: Short-Time Dynamics of Miscible Polymer Blends

9800092

Kumar

The award on this proposal ('Short-Time Dynamics of Miscible Polymer Blends') supports a collaboration between the PI, co-PI Robert Colby, and graduate students from Penn State, and Dieter Richter of the Institute for Solid State Research at the National Research Center in J³lich, Germany, and George Fytas of the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser at the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas in Heraklion, Greece. The research will focus on the long-time dynamics of polymer blends which control the motion of entire chains effecting their viscosity and diffusion coefficients. The ability to predict these features is critical to polymer processing, and is of significant interest to the community. In order to achieve the goals of the proposed research it is necessary to develop collaborations to measure motions at length scales smaller than the whole polymer chain. Both the German group, which is a world leader in quasielastic neutron scattering techniques, and the Greek group, which uses a complementary diagnostic tool, bring unique facilities and expertise to the collaboration.