(607f) Correlating Molecular Details to Emergent Phenomena for Colloidal Dispersions

To gain a better understanding of emergent phenomena at macroscopic scales, we need to rigorously understand relevant physicochemical feature at smaller scales, which would immediately bring a challenge on “connecting scales”. This is especially true if one would like to control emergent phenomena. For example, understanding slurry rheology (one of the important emergent phenomena for colloidal dispersions) is critical to control flows and transport of colloidal dispersions in various engineering applications such as nuclear waste processing at the Hanford site. Slurry rheology indeed results from a delicate balance between repulsive and attractive forces between particles, inter-correlating to details at both molecular and aggregate scales (e.g., crystallinity of solid particles and microstructure of aggregates respectively). Therefore, one should build self-consistent frameworks via a combination of experiments, simulations, and theories to implement correlations between molecular details, particle forces, aggregate structures, and slurry rheology. In this talk, I am going to briefly overview our approach and recent studies/on-going research activities to address such challenge.