Graduate Student Yichen Fang Wins AIChE Polymer Poster Competition
Yichen Fang, graduate student and research assistant, recently won first place in the Area 8A Poster Competition for polymer research at the American Institute of Chemical Engineer’s Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.
The award recognized the best poster presentation on polymer research out of more than 70 competitors. Fang’s winning poster, entitled “High Performance Nanofiber Manufacturing by Centrifugal Forcespinning” displays key parameters and underlying mechanisms that govern the fiber formation and fiber morphology development process.
“The work Yichen presented involves new processing methods for manufacturing high performance fibers, including crosslinked fibers and phosphate glass fibers,” said Chris Ellison, Fang’s supervisor and associate professor of chemical engineering.
Her work seeks to provide an alternative pathway to address current challenges and issues with making fibers from high performance polymeric materials, which usually requires excessive amounts of heat and solvent. The research aims to develop a novel fiber fabrication technique that involves simultaneous centrifugal Forcespinning and polymerization of monomer units, similar to how spiders make silk fibers by assembling protein constituents “on-demand” silk.
Fang’s research in the Lab for Nanostructured Polymeric Materials is currently supported by DuPont through a Young Professor Award and 3M through a Non-Tenured Faculty Award.
Tags: AIChE, Area 8A Poster Competition, chemical engineering, Chris Ellison, high performance fibers, McKetta, polymeric materials, polymers, poster, research, UT Austin, Yichen Fang