March 31, 2003

Engineering Plus . . .

  —NC State Engineer Forges Academic Partnerships

Dr. Donald W. Brenner’s materials science research benefits from collaborations with colleagues in a variety of academic settings. (Photo: Herman Lankford)

Engineering plus physics.  Engineering plus medicine.  Engineering plus old-fashioned, pencil-and-paper mathematics.  Strange bedfellows, perhaps, but combining engineering with other departments has become the name of the game for researchers.

Such collaborations between engineering researchers and academics in other disciplines has strong advantages for both in the contemporary research climate.  Science and engineering have become so complex that one researcher cannot possibly have broad enough expertise for most research projects.  Marriages between engineering and basic science can bring practical applications to ideas forged in the minds of basic researchers.

Dr. Donald W. Brenner, associate professor of materials science at NC State University, uses computers to virtually design molecular machine systems.  Because all of his work involves computer modeling, and he seeks out collaborations that allow him to see practical applications of his models.  “I’m not really interested in developing new computational methods,” he said.  “We try to collaborate with experimentalists.  I’m more interested in applying existing models to research challenges.”

One such challenge is a Department of Energy nanotechnology initiative.  Brenner is collaborating with Dr. Jacqueline Krim, professor of physics at NC State, to solve a problem that will be encountered by nanoscale machine parts.  A big problem with such machines will be heat dissipation at sliding interfaces because the machines will move at very high velocity.  Krim, who is a surface scientist, has a quartz crystal microbalance that can shake with very high frequency that is used in combination with a scanning-tunneling microscope.  Using this instrument, she can study fast-moving interfaces that contain adsorbed hydrocarbon molecules, and determine which of the molecules break down.

Finding out precisely how the molecules break down is Brenner’s job.  “We know what we put on the surface and what products come out at the end, but we don’t know the steps from products to reactants, so we try to fill that in with the modeling,” Brenner said.  “It’s great for us to interact with experimenters like Jackie because it helps us validate our models.  If we predict a product that they don’t see experimentally, obviously we did something wrong.”

Another project involves collaboration between Brenner and Dr. Airat Nazarov, a mathematician in Russia.  Nazarov has developed formulas that characterize the properties of grain boundaries with different crystal orientations, which can have profound effects on the bulk mechanical properties of materials.  “Our computer modeling acts as input data for his pencil-and-paper mathematical modeling,” said Brenner.  “His mathematical modeling bridges from the atomic scale to the macro scale.  We do the simulations and calculate energies for the atoms, and we give that as input to him.  The results enable us to predict how materials will react under real conditions.”

A third area of research that interests Brenner is interaction between materials science and biology. “This is a brand new area for us,” he said. A friend at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has a theory about neurofilaments and the changes that occur during disease processes such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease). “His theory is that a collapsed transition on the side arms of the neurofilament is somehow related to the disease process,” said Brenner. “But no one knows whether it’s a cause or an effect of the disease.” One of Brenner’s students is modeling a neurofilament side arm to determine how the extension of the side arm depends on changes in its structure. “Although our detailed computational studies are far from a cure for this disease, our results will help to validate or refute models such as the collapse transition and help to understand experimental studies that are characterizing these structures,” said Brenner.

Perhaps Brenner’s productive collaborations are not such strange bedfellows after all. “My goal is to have a tool box,” he said, “so if someone from another discipline comes to us with a proposal we will have computational tools that will allow us to work in that area, as opposed to having just one tool or one area that we can work in.”

— rudd —

Technical Contact: 

Dr. Donald W. Brenner, 919-515-1338, brenner@eos.ncsu.edu

Media Contact:

Linda E. Rudd, 919-515-3848, linda_rudd@ncsu.edu

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