Jaroslaw Drelich
A collaboration with Prof. Zhanping You and his PhD student, Lingyun You, from Civil Engineering Department brought Prof. Drelich back to his research with bitumens and asphalts, research he conducted at the University of Utah during his PhD and postdoctoral fellow programs. The objective of this new collaboration at Michigan Tech was to characterize the rheology and structural properties of asphalt using molecular dynamics. In molecular dynamics work, using Amber-Cornell Force-Field, the previously proposed 12-component asphalt model was used by Lingyun You to evaluate the surface tension and structure at the atomistic level of asphalt at different temperatures. The success of this study was that the surface tension of asphalt can be predicted from the molecular dynamics models. The summary of this study is published in the Proceedings of the RILEM International Symposium on Bituminous Materials. The title of the article is Understanding of Structural and Surface Tension Properties of Asphalt Model Using Molecular Dynamics Simulation.
