Research projects

To investigate the molecular mechanism of the Toms effect, coarse-grained molecular simulations were performed to reproduce the behavior of surfactant aqueous solutions in a tube flow. When the hydrophilic wall of the tube, shear thinning is observed regardless of the concentration of the surfactants, whereas in the hydrophobic tube, Newtonian fluid-like behavior and shear thickening are observed. The tube diameter was extended to reproduce the behavior of the surfactant solution in the turbulent and laminar-to-turbulence transition regions. A shear-induced structure, in which rod-like micelles clustered near the center of the tube, was observed, suggesting that the change in the structure affected the drag reduction.

Self-assembly of nanoparticles is used in various functional materials that are familiar to our daily lives. In other words, the self-assembly and those functions have a strong relation. The Janus nanoparticle is a unique anisotropic nanoparticle that typically has two or more distinct functional surface regions (for example, hydrophobic and hydrophilic regions). In this study, I have performed molecular simulations to investigate morphologies of the self-assembled Janus nanoparticles. As a result, evidence of rich polymorphic structures of the Janus nanoparticles is revealed for the first time, and I found some conditions which are observed highly ordered morphologies tend to form.