Engineering topics

Premadasa, Uvinduni

Publications and source records attributed to Premadasa, Uvinduni.

3 records

DOE OSTI2023

Probing liquid/liquid interfaces at and away from equilibrium using vibrational sum frequency generation

The self-assembly and transport of species at oil/aqueous interfaces represent key mechanistic steps in processes spanning from liquid extraction to soft-matter neuromorphic electrical devices. While technologically and fundamentally important, there is a notable lack of chemical understanding regarding these buried interfaces due to challenges in differentiating species located at the surface from the nearby bulk phases. In this work, we will describe some of the challenges in probing chemistry at these liquid/liquid interfaces and detail the approaches we have developed using vibrational sum frequency generation to enable studies of these complex interfaces at and away from equilibrium. From these spectroscopic developments, new insight into solvation, ion pairing, aggregation, complexation, and transport will be discussed in the context of solvent extraction chemistry. Notably, we show how the presence of both oil and aqueous phases provides an environment to drive fundamentally different phenomena from what is observed at model air/aqueous interfaces. This difference arises from key differences in solvation and bulk populations that feedback onto the surface to drive emergent and often functional molecular assemblies.

Doughty, Benjamin L↗

DOE OSTI2023

Multimodal nonlinear optical imaging via evanescent wave excitation

A system for multimodal nonlinear optical imaging is provided. Each mode uses a high NA objective to cause total internal reflection excitation at a sample-substrate interface. The system has a femtosecond oscillator to generate pulses used for two beams. The objective receives at least one beam, redirects the received at least one beam through a dielectric substrate to cause the TIR and produces corresponding evanescent waves in a portion of the sample adjacent to the sample-substrate interface, and collects a backward-propagating beam of pulses of responsive light. The portion of the sample illuminated by the evanescent waves emits responsive light. Different modes or combinations of the distinct modalities may be selected to access complementary chemical and structural information for various chemical species near the sample-substrate interface. Each mode may have mode-specific control such as selective beam blocking, power ratios and filtering.

Doughty, Benjamin L.↗

DOE OSTI2021

Understanding Self-Assembly and the Stabilization of Liquid/Liquid Interfaces: The Importance of Ligand Tail Branching and Oil-Phase Solvation

Organophosphorus-based ligands represent a versatile set of solvent extraction reagents whose chemical makeup plays an important role in extraction mechanism. We hypothesize that the branching of the extractant hydrophobic tail and its oil-phase solvation affect the liquid/liquid interfacial structure. Understanding the structure mediated adsorption and interfacial ordering becomes key in designing ligands with enhanced selectivity and efficiency for targeted extractions. We employed vibrational sum frequency generation spectroscopy and interfacial tension measurements to extract thermodynamic adsorption energies, map interfacial ordering, and rationalize disparate behaviors of model di-(2-ethylhexyl) phosphoric acid and dioctyl phosphoric acid ligands at the hexadecane water interface. With increased surface loading, ligands with branched hydrophobic tails formed stable interfaces at much lower concentrations than those observed for ligands with linear alkyl tails. The lack of an oil phase and associated solvation results in markedly different interfacial properties, and thus measurements made at air/liquid surfaces cannot be assumed to correlate with the processes occurring at buried liquid/liquid interfaces. Here, we attribute these differences in the surface mediated self-assembly to key variations in hydrophobic interactions and tail solvation taking place in the oil phase demonstrating that interactions in both the polar and nonpolar phases are essential to understand self-assembly and function.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗