Ting Ge
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Materials Science·Early-career
Car tires, bumpers, and packaging films all owe their stretchiness and toughness to the way long chain-like molecules inside them tangle around one another. Chemists can now make polymers as closed loops (rings) instead of chains with two loose ends, and loops tangle in fundamentally different ways: they can slide past each other without knotting, get threaded by a passing chain like a bead on a string, or interlock like links in a chain.
- Fields
Materials Science
Physics
Engineering
- Topics
ring polymers
cyclic polymers
polymer mechanics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Determine how ring polymer topologies, including non-concatenated loops, rings threaded by linear chains, and interlocked "Olympic" rings, form as a function of experimentally controllable parameters such as ring size and linear chain content, using coarse-grained molecular simulations with topological analysis.
- Relate these loop-based topological structures to mechanical properties of bulk ring polymer systems, including elastic modulus, plastic yielding, and fracture toughness, by deforming simulated samples and tracking microscopic rearrangements.
- Test how ring topology governs adhesion and mechanical response at polymer interfaces, where threading of rings by chains from the opposing side may replace the entanglement-based coupling seen in linear polymers.
- Extend theories of polymer elasticity and fracture by incorporating established models for ring conformations and dynamics, and test predictions against experimental collaborators who synthesize and mechanically characterize ring-polymer systems, including nanoparticle composites.
More about the research
This project asks how those loop-based tangles control mechanical behavior, with the goal of turning ring shape into a design knob for softness, stretchability, and resistance to cracking.
Why it matters
Mechanical performance limits where polymers can be used, and current design relies mostly on chemistry rather than molecular shape. By quantifying how closed-loop polymers tangle and fail, the work could give materials engineers a new route to tune stretchability, softness, and fracture toughness, informing the design of elastomers, adhesives at polymer interfaces, and nanoparticle-filled composites.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Gregory Odegard
Michigan Technological University, MI·Materials Science
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Charles Sing
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Engineering
Use hybrid polymer field theory informed by particle simulations to test how steric repulsion and hydrophobic interactions control coacervation between polycations and surfactant micelles.
Sergiy Minko
University of Georgia, GA·Materials Science
Develop ultrasonic processing that functionalizes and polymerizes lignocellulosic ingredients from biomass and industrial waste at 25-50 degrees C, avoiding the degradation and energy cost of conventional 200-280 degrees C polycondensation.
The school
University of South Carolina-Columbia: 22 labs on PI Pages, $277M a year on research, 425 research doctorates a year.
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