1776
Confinement in Soft Materials for Novel Energy Applications

Tuesday, 26 May 2015: 10:20
Conference Room 4K (Hilton Chicago)
S. Mossa (CEA Grenoble)
Confinement at the nano-scale characterizes electro-chemistry and physics of soft materials for energy applications. Consider Nafion, the ionomer used as the proton-conducting membrane in fuel cells. Phase separation upon hydration controls the formation of ionic domains, delimited by the polymer backbone matrix. Details of this self-organized charged confining environment, whose typical nano-metric channels sizes strongly interfere with the correlation length scales of bulk water, and of the consequent degradation of transport properties, still have not been completely elucidated. External confining environments are also ubiquitous in configurations of technological interest, as the solid-state boundaries at the electrodes, with the resulting formation of complex hard/soft materials interfaces.
In this talk I will address these aspects of confinement, and describe some recent molecular dynamics simulation work on two different systems. First, I will focus on model hydrated polymer electrolyte supported ultra-thin films. We have studied hydrated Nafion thin films in contact with unstructured supports, characterized by their global wetting properties only, and found evidence of strongly heterogeneous structural and dynamical behavior of water in different regions of the film. Next, I will introduce a coarse-grained model for ionic surfactants in explicit aqueous solutions. We have studied both the impact of water content on the morphology of the system, and the consequent effect of the formed interfaces on the structural features of the adsorbed fluid. Finally, I will discuss the implications of our work on the current understanding of a large range of systems, where the behaviour of water at the interface with nano-structured soft materials is crucial.