Mitigating the effects of climate change and creating a safer as well as sustainable environment for future generations is the grand challenge facing humankind. The solution to this problem lies either in developing novel sustainable processes that can viably replace existing methods or developing novel materials that are more efficient. However, the novelty of these processes and materials makes it quite challenging to understand and utilize them. The central theme of my research involves exploring these sustainable processes and materials using multi-scale simulations and machine learning (ML) tools.
In this talk, I will discuss the use of atomistic simulations to understand the recycling of plastic. I will show how molecular understanding of plastic breakdown as a function of temperature gained from simulations helped recycle common plastics using a novel thermochemical reactor without the use of any catalyst. I will also discuss a few other applications of multi-scale simulations including determining material properties, modelling 2-D material synthesis etc. The talk will also touch upon how the use of multi-scale simulations and machine learning techniques is helping us move from qualitative to predictive modelling.
Dr. Aditya Dilip Lele is an associate research scholar at Princeton University. He graduated in 2015 with a B. Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from VIT, Pune, India. He earned his master’s degree in 2018 from Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) in Mechanical Engineering. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 2021 along with a minor in Computational Materials under the supervision of Prof. Adri van Duin. Later, he joined Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department at Princeton University as a postdoctoral research associate in the lab of Prof. Yiguang Ju. His research focuses on using multi-scale computational modelling tools and machine learning to tackle problems related to sustainability. His research experience includes modelling sustainable fuel chemistry, material synthesis, and polymer recycling.