About Me
Hi, my name is Kan-Ju Lin. I am currectly a Ph.D candidate in Chemical Engineering department at Penn State. My advisor, Dr Janna Maranas, leads our group investigating molecular mobility in soft materials. While our group does both experimental and computaional stuides, my research is mainly computational, with insights provided from experimentalists.
My research focuses on ion motion and transport mechanism in solid state polymer electrlytes (SPEs), especially for battery application. I use molecular dynamics simulation to investigate polymer-cation correlation at molecular level. By collaborating with research groups from Penn State and UPenn, we conduct our investigations via various approaches: X-ray scattering, dielectric spectroscopy, NMR, FTIR, ab initio, quasi-elastic neutron scattering (QENS), and MD simulation. These techniques provide information a wide range of length scales and time scales, and also reveal phenomena from different perspectives. Connecting results among different techniques, and come up with comprehensive pictures on these materials are the main challenges/fun of my research.
While most studies on SPEs are devoted to PEO/salt systems, our research collaboration focuses on PEO-based ionomers. The major advantage of ionomers over PEO/salt is to prevent electrolyte concentration polarization, and consequently improves the lifetime of the batteries. For more about ionomers, please see the ionomer session.
To learn more about me and my research, check out the links above. If you would like to discuss the techniques I use and my research, or any comment, feel free to contact me at kxl281[at]psu.edu.
