05-04-04

IOWA STATE RESEARCH GROUP AWARDED $1 MILLION GRANT FOR NANOSCALE RESEARCH

AMES, Iowa --An interdisciplinary research group led by Rodney O. Fox, Herbert L. Stiles Professor of ChemicalEngineering at Iowa State University, has been awarded a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation toinvestigate the aggregation of nanoparticles in chemical reaction processes.

Fox's Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team is comprised of scientists and engineers from the chemistry, chemicalengineering and mechanical engineering departments at ISU, Kansas State University and the University of Minnesota.Joining them in the project will be scientists from ETH Zrich (the Swiss Federal Technical University) and companiessuch as Merck, Dupont, BASF and Dow Chemical.

The goal is to better understand the behavior of particles in chemical reacting flows. The researchers will examinethis behavior at various stages of the chemical reaction process, focusing on such areas as quantum mechanical codes,particle surface chemistry, molecular dynamic simulations and large-scale clusters.

The studies may benefit the chemical and pharmaceutical industries in their efforts to prevent nanoparticles fromaggregating into larger units, which can alter the fundamental characteristics of their products.

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