Friday, March 2, 2018
Dr. Shing-Chung “Josh” Wong
University of Akron
2:00 - 3:30pm
SEH, 2990
Abstract
In a series of research and development studies, Wong, his students and coworkers have presented understanding and thus a platform technology for processing high shear and low peel dry adhesives based on electrospinning-enabled techniques. Nature inspired adhesion is performed using electrospun polymer blends. Electrospun nonwovens are used in commercial processes for applications in filter media, sound-proof partitions, biomedical scaffolds, wound dressings, water-absorbent materials, etc. None applied these nonwovens as effective, repositionable dry adhesives with tunable shear and peel adhesion strengths. In this study, we prepare fibers that produce adhesion on a rigid substrate. Traditionally, polymer alloys and blends were achieved via large scale extrusion compounding or reactive mixing. In our work, a highly spinnable polymer is blended with a low Tg component in a heterogeneous morphology by scalable electrospinning. Electrospinning is a viable approach to forming nanoscale connectors and mechanical interlocks between polymer-polymer and polymer-inorganic interfaces. The formation of multicomponent polymer blends by electrospinning contributes to a marked increase in adhesion strength and yet continuous and/or co-continuous morphology. This talk will also review some recent advances in applying electrospinning techniques to harvest fresh water from atmospheric airborne particles.
Biography
Professor Wong began his graduate training in 1993 in mechanics and mechanisms of fracture of polymer blends with and without glass fiber reinforcements at UMass Amherst. Later he joined the group of Yiu-Wing Mai, FRS, at the University of Sydney on identifying the roles of maleated block copolymers as a sequence of events in toughening nylon polypropylene blends. He later pursued an academic career in the School of Materials Science and Engineering in Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Dr. Wong authored and co-authored over 80 research articles in books, journals and patent literatures, with additional invited, keynote and plenary talks in numerous conferences. There were over 3900 citations according to Google Scholar as of 2017. Two papers on graphite nanocomposites and electrospinning, respectively, were each cited over 450 times. Dr. Wong is widely published in polymer chemistry journals. In 2007 he was selected for an NSF Faculty Early CAREER Award entitled "Electrospinning-Enabled Bio-Inspired Materials Research and Education" from the Program of Materials Processing and Manufacturing by the National Science Foundation, USA. He is an elected Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (F.ASME) in 2014 and an elected Fellow of the Society of Plastics Engineers (F.SPE) in 2015. He is a full professor (2013 -) with tenure (2009 -) at the University of Akron. In this capacity, he is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Akron Ascent Innovations.