Principal Investigator George Stephanopoulos
With the proposition of “nanoscale factories” as the next frontier of processing scales, process systems engineering must offer new theories and tools to handle the design, simulation, operation and control of active processing systems with the following distinguishing features:
(a) The “unit operations” are self-assembled supramolecular structures at the scale of a few nanometers.
(b) The spatial topology of the “process flowsheets” is guided by molecular scaffolds and the unit operations are positioned in space through directed self-organization mechanisms of independent units.
(c) The operation of such “supramolecular factories” is driven by pre-programmed information encoded in the design of the system itself, and is robustly controllable through local feedback loops with no evidence of centralized coordination mechanisms.
Self-assembly of molecules into supramolecular structures and their guided organization into an integrated processing system are at the core of the needed new theories and methodologies. Design issues arising from the ensuing complexity and the looming threat of computational irreducibility, must be addressed. Information encoded into the judicious design of molecular structures and networks is leading to a convergence of chemistry, biology and computer science, with Systems Biology being its most visible manifestation. Molecular computers have opened the possibility of preprogrammed operations at the local level of nanoscale unit operations and the global scale of an integrated process. What is the role of purposeful engineering, as exemplified by the tradition of PSE, in shaping these developments?
Engineering nanoscale processes is in essence the engineering of complex systems, whose hallmarks are: self-assembly (at a small scale), self-organization (at a larger scale), self-replication, adaptation and self-regulation.
In this research program we develop systematic design approaches for the generation of nanostructures with desired geometries through the self-assembling of nanoscale particles. Based on a multi-scale modeling of statistical physics, we are exploring the systematic design of domain conditions, which guide the evolution of random particle configurations towards the formation of the desired structures.