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Hiya! My name is Tiffany and I'm I’m entering my fifth year as a Ph.D student in Materials Science and Engineering here at Cornell University. I grew up in Southeastern Virginia and earned my B.S. in Chemistry from the College of William and Mary in 2009. That fall, I started graduate school but within a year I found that I needed a break (as I had been busy with classes, work, and extracurricular activities nonstop since I started college) so I took a leave of absence and worked as an analytical chemist in an environmental testing lab here in Tompkins County. I performed over 15 different assays to assess water quality of samples from households, businesses, and from local streams/lakes. Although the job was quite interesting, after a while I found myself again wanting to perform independent research so about a year later I returned to Cornell to begin working on my current research project.
In my spare time, I enjoy gardening, hiking, and working on various art projects. I've I’ve recently taken up painting, but I find my heart lies with collage and photography. I have two cats, Cosmo (a mischievous brown tabby) and Betsy (a mustachioed calico) who like to watch videos of other cats on the internet. I also enjoy long walks on the beach, but am not much of a fan of piña coladas or getting caught in the rain.
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To produce these HPCs, I use a method called "freeze casting" “freeze casting” to create a large, monolithic structure (akin to a foam) made of my carbon precursor. To do this, a suspension of polymer colloids (typically <10 nm in diameter) is blended with colloidal silica nanoparticles with diameters between 4 and 20 nm. The mixture is then poured into a mold and frozen at a known temperature. As the mixture freezes, there is a phase separation of the ice and colloid phases, where the colloid is pushed into the space between adjacent ice crystals. The solidified ice is removed from the structure through freeze-drying, which preserves the interconnected polymer structure. The pores resulting from the ice crystals are called macropores and tend to be between 1 and 100 um in diameter (the size is dependent on the freezing temperature used). Smaller pores between 2 and 50 nm in diameter, called mesopores, are formed through the etching of the silica template, and even smaller pores (less than 2 nm in diameter) are formed through "activation" “activation” of the carbon. The size of these three porous domains may be tweaked independently via changes in synthesis conditions; as a result, carbons having a large variety of pore sizes may be created.
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