Bio
Shiqin got her bachelor degree of Chemical engineering at the University of Iowa in 2016. She worked in Professor Julie Jessop’s group for a year and half for her undergraduate research which is about the comparison between ultraviolet and electron-beam cured polymer. She join Professor Schultz group in 2017 Fall, and now she is working on rheological modifier.
Work
Rheological modifiers are important substance in many food, cosmetic, paints and household product. Hydrogenated castor oil (HCO), as one of the rheological modifiers with fibrous shape, introduces desired rheological behavior to the commercial product with low volume fraction, and its gelation process has been characterized by some previous work. HCO, however, is a polydisperse system, its fibers’ length is distributed over a wide range, from 1-50 𝜇m. One problem associated with polydisperse system is that polydisperse system is relatively harder to reproduce with exactly same rheology during the process than monodisperse system. Hence, in this project, we try to characterize both monodisperse system and polydisperse system, Polyamide (PA) and HCO, to explore the similarities and differences between these two systems. We find that both HCO and PA undergo gelation process when depletion interaction is introduced to the system, and PA showed better gelation ability when compared to HCO system.