News Article
Iowa State Group Wins Million Dollar Grant for Nanoscale Research
An interdisciplinary research group led by Rodney O. Fox, Herbert L. Stiles Professor of Chemical Engineering at Iowa State University, has been awarded a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the aggregation of nanoparticles in chemical reaction processes.
Fox's Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) will undertake a multi-year project involving scientists and engineers from the chemistry, chemical engineering, and mechanical engineering departments at Iowa State, together with colleagues from Kansas State University and the University of Minnesota. The goal of the researchers is to better understand the behavior of particles in chemical reacting flows.
"If we can understand what happens, then we can control it," says Fox. "Right now this is done empirically and that's kind of a hit and miss proposition." The research team will examine the behavior of particles at various stages of the chemical reaction process within their own areas of expertise, including quantum mechanical codes, particle surface chemistry, molecular dynamic simulations, and large-scale clusters. "It's a sort of multi-scale problem," Fox adds, "and that makes it interesting and difficult."
The work of the NIRT researchers is of special interest to the chemical and pharmaceutical industries in their efforts to prevent nanoparticles from aggregating into larger units, which can alter the fundamental characteristics of their products.
Besides faculty at the three universities, the project will also engage researchers from ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Technical University) and companies such as Merck, Dupont, BASF, and Dow Chemical.
