Daniel Shoemaker
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Materials Science
Many useful solid materials are made by dissolving starting chemicals in a hot liquid and letting the desired solid crystallize out, a route called solvothermal synthesis. Water works for many compounds, but whole families of important materials, including intermetallics (compounds of two or more metals), sulfides and nitrides, form more readily in organic solvents.
- Fields
Materials Science
Chemistry
- Topics
solvothermal synthesis
non-aqueous solvents
organic solvents
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Measure and build predictive models for the chemical potentials of dissolved ions in non-aqueous organic solvents such as ethanol, ammonia, acetonitrile and DMSO, combining experimental thermochemistry with computational modeling.
- Combine these ion chemical potentials with high-dimensional thermodynamic frameworks to predict the solubility and chemical equilibria of complex solid materials under different non-aqueous solvents and conditions.
- Build solvothermal phase diagrams, maps of which solids will precipitate under given conditions, to guide targeted solution synthesis of intermetallics, sulfides and nitrides, and connect them to freely available thermochemical databases.
More about the research
There are dozens of such solvents, such as ethanol, ammonia, acetonitrile and DMSO. Yet chemists have no rigorous way to predict which solvent and starting material will produce a given target, so they rely on rules of thumb and slow trial and error.
Why it matters
Predictive phase diagrams could let chemists design synthesis recipes rationally instead of optimizing them by trial and error. This could speed the manufacture of new, more complex or higher-quality functional materials, such as sulfides, nitrides and intermetallics, that cannot easily be made in water. Linking the tools to free thermochemical databases would make them widely usable by materials chemists.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kenneth Poeppelmeier
Northwestern University, IL·Chemistry
Develop targeted hydrothermal, solvothermal and solid-state synthesis methods that control how anionic building units align in oxide and oxide-fluoride crystals, so that crystals form without inversion symmetry.
Edward Gillan
University of Iowa, IA·Chemistry
Identify the factors that control composition and crystal structure when highly exothermic, seconds-long thermochemical reactions form crystalline metal borides of earth-abundant 3d and 4d metals in a transient molten salt flux.
Daniel Fredrickson
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Chemistry
Develop computational tools to compare chemical pressure scaffolds, networks of overly compressed atom-to-atom contacts, across intermetallic crystal structures and connect them to material properties.
The school
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: 41 labs on PI Pages, $907M a year on research, 870 research doctorates a year.
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