Research Projects

This project aims to interrogate and design new methods for aerobic oxygenation of polyolefins (POs) to achieve two related goals: (1) prepare new polymeric materials with favorable properties and (2) convert mixed plastics waste into low molecular weight feedstock chemicals with high yield and selectivity. The upcycling and conversion of waste plastics within a circular carbon economy is a grand challenge.

As plastic waste in our environment continues to increase, there becomes an increasing need to understand how these plastics degrade and breakdown in the environment and the material that this degradation leaves behind. To explore this topic, we study the hydrolysis of polyesters with an emphasis on characterizing the material that is released from the bulk into solution. Due to the inherent structure in semicrystalline polymers, degradation in the amorphous interlamellar regions can lead to micro- and nano-scale crystalline lamella being shed from the bulk materials.

Material design has long been driven by time intensive trial-and-error experimentation. This has become a rate-limiting step as modern challenges mount in complexity, introducing overwhelming design decisions that scale with the topic.

Polymers do not fully solidify into well-ordered crystalline structures but rather possess a non-equilibrium microstructure that is a combination of the crystalline state and the liquid "amorphous" state -- hence the adjective semi-crystalline.

Much of the commercially available plastics typically are a combination of up to 3-12 layers of different plastics. Traditional recycling processes are incapable of handling such materials. In this project, we are working on novel methods to reprocess these materials by understanding them on micro and macroscopic scales. This would then enable sustainable methods to reprocess and reuse these materials.