Department Personnel
Joyce Chair Professor Scott T. Milner
Office: 120 Fenske Laboratory
Phone: (814) 863-9355
Fax: (814) 865-7846
E-mail: smilner@engr.psu.edu
Staff Assistant: Sandra Brown
Phone: (814) 865-2577
Research Interests
Research in the Milner group is focused on using microscopic and mesoscopic physics-based theory and simulation techniques to understand the behavior of polymers and complex fluids, in a wide variety of settings. The problems studied are at the same time of fundamental scientific interest, and of practical importance in controlling the material properties of designed materials.
- What is the mechanism by which polymer crystals nucleate, and by what means do processing flows have such a strong effect on this nucleation?
- How can we understand the origins of glassy behavior in dense liquids, in terms of the scarcity of free volume in which the particles may move locally?
- How does the "handedness" of DNA molecules reveal itself in terms of the elastic behavior of the molecule as it bends and fluctuates in shape?
- How does flow affect structure and alignment in complex fluids, such as phase-separating polymer solutions and block copolymer mesophases?
- How can we increase the efficiency and effectiveness of slipink simulations, widely used to simulate the flow behavior of entangled linear and branched polymers?
- How does the "tube diameter" of an entangled polymer melt, which determines the magnitude of elastic effects in flow, arise from interplay of stiffness and bulkiness of the chains, with topological uncrossability?