A NICHE FOR BIOMASS espite growing interest in replacing fossil resources with renewable biobased alternatives, biomass refining industries, such as those producing biofuels, struggle to compete with the well-established machinery of petroleum refining. While biomass may not displace fossil fuels in transportation any time soon, there are places where biomass can compete. For example, crude oil is also used to synthesize reactive chemical intermediates that are used in production of solvents, plastics, and polymers. Sometimes, they are easier to synthesize from biomass.
TENSION AND FLOW Surfactants—chemical compounds that determine surface tension—are everywhere.
Professor Jesse Bond received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award to further explore one such chemical intermediate’s applications. His work will support development of catalysts and cost-effective technologies to facilitate oxidation of levulinic acid to deliver value-added chemical products, such as maleic anhydride.
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hey’re relevant to the form and function of the human body, soaps and toothpastes—even hydraulic fracturing fluids. When surfactants are dissolved in water, they come together as micelles in the form of spheres, cylinders, vesicles, and lamellae. Their shape and dynamics are of great fundamental and practical interest in all of their applications. For the first time, Professor Radhakrishna Sureshkumar and fellow researchers used molecular simulations to provide a quantitative description of the shear-induced movement, orientation, stretching, and scission of rodlike surfactant micelles. This methodology was further extended to solutions that contain multiple micelles and nanoparticles for studying emerging morphologies, flow-structure interactions, and rheological properties.
“My hope is that this research pushes a technology forward that has a positive net impact on sustainability,” says Bond. “Beyond that, my goal is to teach our students about major problems facing society and ways that chemical engineering and catalysis can address those problems by making use of natural resources.”
Paper: “Dynamics and Scission of Rodlike Cationic Surfactant Micelles in Shear Flow,” Sambasivam, Sangwai, Sureshkumar, Physical Review Letters, 2015.
Paper: “Topology, length scales, and energetics of surfactant micelles,” Sureshkumar, The Journal of Chemical Physics, 2015.
Gifts from donors like you contribute to classroom upgrades like the Sandra and Avi Nash Collaborative Classroom used in Professor Cadwell’s teaching. They pay for state-of-the-art laboratory equipment needed to conduct groundbreaking research like Professor Gilbert’s in the Syracuse Biomaterials Institute. Gifts provide students like Ariel Ash-Shakoor with research endeavors and community outreach activities that simply could not exist without our donors’ steadfast commitment.
Alexis Peña ’16 and Stephen Benn ’16 received Research Awards. Peña’s most recent work characterized the spatial and temporal bias of cortical progenitors in the mammalian cortex at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Benn’s research is in developing a dissolvable plastic sleeve that goes under the skin to surround and heal broken bones as an alternative to external casts.
h.D. student Ariel Ash-Shakoor received a Community Award recognizing her efforts as a leader in the STEM tutoring program at the Syracuse Northeast Community Center.
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Biomedical and Chemical Engineering
n an example of a true collaboration between the Department of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering and the Department of Physics, Professors Jay Henderson and Lisa Manning combine knowledge from their respective disciplines to study cell behavior as part of the Soft Interfaces Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship and a National Science Foundation Collaborative Award.
Three biomedical engineering students received Student Leadership Awards at the 30th Annual Black Engineer of the Year Award STEM Conference in February.
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We share these accomplishments with you because you are a part of us. As an alumnus or a friend of this Department of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering, you have contributed to our shared success by your very association. A great many of you have also generously helped fund the endeavors highlighted within this newsletter.
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As an engineering department set within a comprehensive University, faculty and students are provided with opportunities to work with a range of other disciplines.
Their current collaborations expand their research to automated analysis of cell polarization during wound healing and modeling cell cultures on 2D shape changing substrates. Their latest research will be published in 2016.
Paper: “Uniaxial Extension of Surfactant Micelles: Counterion Mediated Chain Stiffening and a Mechanism of Rupture by Flow-Induced Energy Redistribution,” Dhakal, Sureshkumar, ACS Macro Letters, 2016.
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Together, their research groups developed an automated approach to accurately track the movement of cells—vital for understanding how cells and tissues work and helping to heal injured tissues or treat diseases such as cancer.
Paper: “Self-Assembly of Nanoparticle–Surfactant Complexes with Rodlike Micelles: A Molecular Dynamics Study,” Sambasivam, Sangwai, Sureshkumar, Langmuir, 2016.
With your help, there is no limit what your Department can achieve. Please consider giving online at eng-cs.syr.edu/givenow.
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R POLYMER PUTS NEW MEDICAL SOLUTIONS WITHIN REACH
esearchers in the medical field have been searching for a way to combine the properties of liquid crystallinity with those of hydrogels to develop things like artificial blood vessels that would be biocompatible. Liquid crystals have the fluidity of liquid with some of the order of a crystal so they can be oriented to have structure. They are not ideal for use inside the body because they are quite hydrophobic. On the other hand, hydrogels are hydrophilic and can survive in the body but lack the ordering (so-called “anisotropy”) inherent to biological tissues. Professor Pat Mather reveals a process to create a material that combines liquid crystals with hydrogel, introducing potential for new materials that have the same mechanical properties as soft tissues in the body. “It is a balancing act of not having too many water-loving groups in the polymer and incorporating components in the polymer that promote structure,” says Mather. Paper: Cover featured article “A hydrogel-forming liquid crystalline elastomer exhibiting soft shape memory,” Torbati, Mather, Polymer Physics, 2016.
Ariel Ash-Shakoor Ph.D. student
Stephen Benn ’16
Alexis Peña ’16
IMPLANTS UNDER BIOLOGICAL ATTACK
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bout half a million people receive hip replacements worldwide every year. Of these, a small percentage will develop health complications due to their implant, such as inflammation and infection.
Gilbert inspected hip and knee implants that had been removed from patients. In examining them, his research team discovered telltale corrosive “footprints” of phagocytic cells on the metal surface of the implant.
For more than 40 years, total hip replacements have primarily been made from metal alloys and plastic. As the patient walks, the metal ball and plastic socket surfaces rub together and particles and corrosion-based ions are released into surrounding tissue. The assumption in the orthopedic research community has been that these particles and ions were causing biological reactions that may result in some health problems in some patients.
These findings reveal that the relationship between implants and the body are more complicated than previously thought and expand the scope of potential research and medical advances in the area of orthopedics.
Professor Jeremy Gilbert’s research shows that wear is not the only way implants can corrode. Our biology may also wage an attack on the foreign implant directly. “Our research finds that our bodies’ own biological reactions may cause the corrosion directly, and that’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about these interactions,“ explains Gilbert.
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“The idea that inflammatory cells in the body can directly corrode the surface of an implant opens up the possibility that it is not just that wear and corrosion that causes adverse local tissue reactions, but that adverse local tissue reactions can cause corrosion,” explains Gilbert. “A small fundamental advance like this can uncover countless new paths and questions that can lead to many technical advances to help deal with an issue that is significant in orthopedics today.” Paper: “Direct in vivo inflammatory cell-induced corrosion of CoCrMo alloy orthopedic implant surfaces,” Gilbert, Sivan, Liu, Kocagöz, Arnholt, Kurtz, Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A, 2015.