Kenneth J. Beers
Current Research

With the aid of advances in synthetic techniques for controlling microstructure, polymer science is experiencing a period of extensive growth and expansion into new areas of application. Materials such as block copolymers, impact modified glassy polymers, thermoplastic elastomers, and nanocomposites find wide-scale use because of the ability to tailor their mechanical, surface, optical, and electrical properties.

Our research is focused upon understanding how chemical and physical processes control the development of microstructure and how such structure affects physical properties. Because these processes operate on multiple time and length scales, we are developing, supported by experiments on model systems, computational techniques that describe polymer behavior from the atomistic to the continuum levels.

One current activity along this line is the use of multi-scale modeling to investigate how chemical structure affects plastic deformation in glassy polymers. A hybrid technique on the atomistic level, using both classical and ab initio quantum simulation, has also recently been developed to design ligands in organometallic crystals for their effect upon the electrical and optical properties.

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