Jianzhong Wu

Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and Department of Mathematics, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521

 

Density functional theory (DFT) offers a generic mathematical framework to describe the equilibrium or ground-state properties of chemical systems and condensed matter in terms of one-body density profiles. Although the original concepts, introduced first by Pierre Hohenberg and Walter Kohn in 1964, were intended to provide an alternative to solving the Schrödinger equation for electronic wave functions at 0 K, the theoretical procedure can be similarly applied to arbitrary many-body systems at equilibrium and to various thermodynamic models for simple fluids and polymeric materials. This talk presents a family of density functionals that can be used to predict the structural and physicochemical properties of complex molecular systems such as inhomogeneous electrolyte solutions and ionic liquids, polyelectrolytes, block copolymers and brushes. Examples will be given to illustrate DFT including applications to gas adsorption in nanoporous materials, electric-double layer supercapacitors, polymer composites, and self- assembly of viral capsids.  

 

Short Biography: Dr. Jianzhong Wu is a professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and a cooperating faculty member of Applied Mathematics at the University of California, Riverside. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, M.S. and B.E. in Chemical Engineering and B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Tsinghua University, Beijing. His research is focused on development and application of statistical-mechanical methods, in particular density functional theory, for describing the microscopic structure and physiochemical properties of confined fluids, soft materials and biological systems