PhD Position: Control Over the Hydration/dehydration of Salt Crystals Using a Microfluidic Platform

Are you a highly motivated physicist, physical-chemist, or chemists with a strong interest in interdisciplinary research? We are seeking an excellent and ambitious PhD candidate to carry out fundamental research on micro-controlled hydrated crystal growth combined with optical microspectroscopy techniques.

Hydrated crystals – crystals with water incorporated into the crystalline structures of certain salts – are an important class of materials which have shown surprisingly new and exciting behaviors. They constitute a new field of study, both for their technological and fundamental interests. First, these crystals are promising materials as thermochemical and phase change materials for thermal energy storage, where the release or incorporation of water in the lattice is accompanied by heat release or storage. These crystals therefore form a promising solution to climatize buildings and reutilize waste heat from industrial processes. Second, hydrated salts are not only abundant and ubiquitous on the surface of the Earth but are also present on Mars providing vital information on the hydrogeologic history of other planets.

Hydrated crystals exhibit intriguing fundamentally novel structural and optical properties at the microscale, including structural colors and uncommon mechanical properties during hydration/dehydration. These properties have largely remained unexplored and the role of the stoichiometry of water in the crystalline structure is poorly understood. The main challenge lies in the metastable nature of these crystals: many properties are transient and only observable during the water uptake or release. At the same time, limited control over the local precursor concentration, temperature, and humidity hinders systematic investigation of their growth and transition dynamics.

In this project, you will combine micro-engineered reaction chambers and in-situ optical spectroscopy to unravel the unconventional properties of growth and dissolution of hydrated crystals.

Merging fully controlled microfluidic crystal growth with in-situ optical spectroscopy offers tantalizing prospects: Can the transient crystal properties be captured in a meta-stable state to study them in-situ? What is the physical mechanism underlying the structural colors at the single-crystal level? How do crystals grow in confined geometries, and how do neighboring crystal domains interact during growth?Addressing these fundamental research questions will lead to completely new insights in the field of crystal growth and requires the development of a novel platform for in-situ microfluidic single crystal growth. Using these methods, we will be able to link the microscale properties of the hydrated crystals to their thermochemical behaviour, i.e. producing heat during the hydration and storing heat during dehydration reaction in a sustainable manner.

This project will be carried out in a collaborative setting between two research groups of the Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute (WZI), comprised of an exciting team of researchers with a strong emphasis on collaboration.

Recently published related article:
Wijnhorst, R., Demmenie, M., Jambon-Puillet, E., Ariese, F., Bonn, D., & Shahidzadeh, N. (2023). Softness of hydrated salt crystals under deliquescence. Nature Communications, 14(1), 1090.

For more info, please visit the official vacancy web page of the University of Amsterdam:
PhD Position: Control Over the Hydration/dehydration of Salt Crystals Using a Microfluidic Platform (uva.nl)

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Van der Waals-Zeeman Instituut
University of Amsterdam
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