Research Projects

Solid-liquid interface plays an important role in many scientific process e.g., energy materials, elctrochemistry, catalysis, or corrosion etc. Thus, complete understanding of solid-liquid interface is vital as it govern key properties like charge transfer or mass transfer etc. In recent years, for the above mentioned utilization, effort have been made to replace the conventional liquids (water, or acid etc.) with other new designer liquids such as ionic liquids (ILs) or deep eutectic solvents (DES) etc. Although, these designer liquids have shown a tremendous promise, many factors limit their applicability. One of these factor is the poor understanding of the solid-liquid interface. This problem primarily arises due to the limitation of conventional experiment to provide the information about the solid-liquids interface e.g, interface between ILs-solid is quasi-crystalline in nature. Therefore, techniques like STM or scattering experiments provide very little information about ILs-solid interface. Furthermore, using these techniques one is unable to identify the molecular descriptors governing the interface. Molecular simulations can be answer to this challenge. We plan to utilize multi-scale modeling to address this issue. Utilizing this, we will provide the details of the interface between solids and designer liquids. Here, primary focus would be to capture the molecular processes and phenomena regulating the behavior of the interface. This knowledge will be crucial in rationalizing the choice of designer liquid for specific task (e.g., lubrication) corresponding the material nature and geometries.