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Chemistry Professor to Explore Dynamics of Plastics02:11PM / Monday, February 09, 2009
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The first 2009 Faculty Lecture Series at Williams College will be given by Dieter Bingemann, associate professor of chemistry, on Thursday, Feb. 12, at 4 p.m.
Bingemann will deliver his lecture, "Polymer Dynamics or 'Just One Word: Plastics,'" in the Science Center's Wege Auditorium.
"At some point during the 1980s, plastic surpassed steel as the most widely used material in the world," said Bingemann. "Even though plastic seems just as hard as iron on the macroscopic scale, the two materials could not be more different at the molecular level."
In his lecture, he will describe glass dynamics that his lab has discovered by studying glasses one molecule at a time. There are, he said, "hundreds of rearrangements every second in a seemingly rock-solid sample, back-and-forth steps as if the molecules try to scout new arrangements, a lack of memory and many other surprises."
Bingemann will examine the structure of plastics and consider whether it is "a good trade, substituting plastic for metal." The lecture will unravel plastic's glass dynamics, which "remain a mystery to this day despite its widespread use as a structural material."
His lab's research focuses on molecular spectroscopy of dynamic heterogeneities (an analysis of the properties of glasses on a molecular scale and of the consequence of a correlation often called "dynamic heterogeneity").
Bingemann has written numerous articles, many for the Journal of Chemical Physics. He received his bachelor's degree from Georg-August Universitet in 1989 and his doctorate in physical chemistry from Georg-August Universitet and the Max–Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in 1994. He did his postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. |
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