Prof. Jincheng Du, University of North Texas
Environmental Degradation of Inorganic Glasses: from Bioactive Materials to Nuclear Waste Disposal
Inorganic glasses find wide applications from consumer products such as windowpanes and drinking vessels to high technologies such as optical communications, biomedicine, and nuclear waste disposal. Environmental degradation or corrosion properties of these glasses are critical to many of these applications. Some applications require the glass to be extremely durable such as in nuclear waste management to safely hold the radioactive elements for thousands of years or longer while in other applications such as biomedicine to degrade in a matter of weeks or months. How to reconcile and understand materials with such vast differences of dissolution behaviors is a scientific challenge. In this talk, I will present the overall corrosion behaviors of inorganic glasses then introduce our research by applying multiscale simulation methods, from first principles, reactive molecular dynamics to Monte Carlo simulations, to understand the corrosion of inorganic materials. Examples of studies in corrosion of silicate and borosilicate glasses in aqueous environments will then be presented. Advanced materials characterizations such as atom probe tomography and neutron diffractions were used to validate the simulation results. Insights gained on interfacial reactions and the formation of corrosion gel layer and their effect on short term and long-term corrosion help to design glass materials for different applications to address healthcare, energy and environmental challenges.
Bio:
Dr. Jincheng Du is Department Chair and University Distinguished Research Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at University of North Texas, Denton TX. He completed his Ph.D. in Ceramic Science from Alfred University and his postdoctoral training at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). After a stint as research associate in chemical engineering at University Virginia, he joined UNT as a faculty member. His current research focuses on atomistic simulations of complex structures, structure-property relations, transport and environment interactions in glass and glass-ceramic materials for energy, biomedicine and microelectronic applications. He has published 2 books, 10 book chapters and over 250 peer reviewed journal papers. He is an Editor of the Journal of the American Ceramic Society and serves as the chair of the technical committee on atomistic modeling of International Commission of Glass (ICG). Among other distinctions, he is a recipient of the Research Leadership Award, Faculty Research Award, and Early Career Award of Research and Creativity of UNT. He also received the Fulbright US Scholar Award, Gordon Fulcher Distinguished Scholar of Corning Inc., and the W.E.S Turner Award of ICG. He is an elected Fellow of the American Ceramic Society and American Society of Materials.