A nano-sized polymer sphere impregnated with drugs and injected into a body where a complex nanoscale lattice will slowly release a drug before biodegrading into tissue is under development by Materials Science and Engineering Professor Emmanuel Giannelis. “In the old days, we had materials with properties that had compromises and tradeoffs. But here comes nanotechnology and nanocomposites, where if we pay attention to how these blocks are put together and dispersed at the nanometer scale, you can have structures with unique properties,” Giannelis says.

Lynden Archer, professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, studies the fluid dynamics of polymers. Some of his work is devoted to the problem of engineering materials that are in one way or another self-lubricating. These materials are promising for a variety of applications either where conventional lubricants cannot be used (such as jointreplacement surgery), or where their use is too costly (deployed space vehicles such as satellites, spacebased observatories, and permanently deployed space exploration equipment). Self-lubricated components also hold promise for preventing premature failure of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).

“To design an effective self-lubricated material it is necessary that lubricant molecules possess high surface mobility even when chemically grafted to a rigid substrate,” Archer says. “This requirement must be balanced against the known tendency of substrates to slow down relaxation of liquids tethered to them.”

In studying the dynamics of polymeric and oligometric species near rigid substrates, Archer is particularly interested in determining how changes in molecular topology influence friction and drag of lubricant coatings tethered to surfaces.