REU experience at University of Florida

Over the summer of 2022, ME S-STEM scholar, Ms. Chizaram Ugboh participated in a summer REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) at the University of Florida (UF). She had the pleasure of working under Dr. Spearot to investigate dynamic fracture within a hydrogel at the atomistic level. She spent the first few weeks reading various scientific literature on basic hydrogels and PEGDA hydrogels, molecular dynamics, and multiscale modeling and simulation. For weeks three and onwards, she practice atomistic simulation with a peptide molecule and a vacancy defect to improve my programming skills on a Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator (LAMMPS). Soon after she had sharpened her skills with LAMMPS, she began to produce hydrogels of different water concentrations and record their stress and strain data at different timesteps. Having five different water concentrations of hydrogels made it possible for her to see how the hydrogels became more elastic as they absorbed more water. Lastly, she I implemented the break bonds command in the code to cause a fracture. The breaking of bonds for a hydrogel with 50% water weight was compared to a hydrogel with 90% water weight to see how many bonds broke. In my final days at UF, she created a presentation of my work over the ten weeks and presented it to my cohort, various UF graduate students, and faculty.

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