Department of Materials Science & Engineering Seminar Series: Thomas Epps

Description

Thomas Epps, a distinguished professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Delaware, will give a talk titled "From Waste to Polymers: Creating Sustainable Materials from Biomass" for the Department of Materials Science & Engineering.

All in-person events at Johns Hopkins must follow university COVID-19 policies. See current guidelines online. If you'd like to attend online, email dmse@jhu.edu for Zoom link.

Abstract:

This talk will demonstrate that materials with reproducible thermal and mechanical characteristics can be synthesized in a controlled and predictable manner from batches of monomers with complex and somewhat variable compositions, such as minimally processed bio-oils obtained from depolymerized lignin. As one example, we leveraged polymer structure-property relationships to fabricate high-performance pressure sensitive adhesives (PSAs) from compounds directly obtained from raw biomass (poplar wood) deconstruction. These PSAs, generated from biobased block copolymers, exhibited the nanoscale characteristics of conventional phase-separated materials and had peel forces and tack forces that were competitive with commercial tapes. As another example, we investigated the thermomechanical and environmental toxicity behavior of newly created bisguaiacol precursors and epoxy networks, for which the precursor compounds could be derived from lignin. These systems demonstrated drop-in potential, in both synthesis and materials properties, relative to petroleum-based analogues, yet most importantly, demonstrated reduced negative environmental impacts when screened by several common toxicity assays. In the above cases we employed raw biomass as our feedstock; however, we have recently demonstrated the versality of our strategy by expanding our feedstocks to other commercial scale inputs and waste streams.