Polymeric materials are used for personal care products, drugs, tissues, organs, sensors, batteries, coatings among numerous applications. Currently, these products are made in organic solvents (e.g., methanol, butanol), which are toxic and incompatible for human use. Therefore, there is a need to make these products in water, which is biocompatible and environmentally friendly for use. […]

Maintaining all of the equipment in the payload designed for space/near-space operation is a challenge. Because there is insufficient air in the high-altitude environment, the only way to remove heat from sensitive equipment is through conduction and radiation cooling. Other stringent constraints for such payloads, including power consumption, size limitation, and weight limitation, require thermal […]

Even at end of life, automotive rubber is a very resilient product as shown by the difficulty in recycling/reusing rubber tires. Based on a technology to dissolve rubber tires developed in our lab, this project will seek to use “less chemistry” to create siliconized rubber crumb from used tires. The original quality of the automotive […]