Min Li, Ph.D. Email & Phone Number

Saint Paul, Mn, Us

St Paul, Mn, Us

•Support product development of the dental product group.•Develop dental composites, pastes, coatings. •Conduct material characterization and establish relationship among sample performance, processing conditions, and formulations.•Cultivate extensive network of support between laboratory, manufacturing, engineering, sales and marketing.

Conductive nanocomposites with ultralow percolation threshold •Developed a novel Enhanced Dual-Percolation technique to create conductive nanocomposite at an ultralow carbon black concentration to improve processability and to reduce the manufacturing cost. •An eight orders of magnitude increase in electric conductivity was demonstrated in a polypropylene-based nanocomposite system.•Generated porous conductive nanocomposites for high performance filtration, large capacity batteries, and heavy metal pollution control applications.Fabrication of high strength UHMW PTFE continuous fibers•Identified the fundamental mechanism and the key processing parameters which could significantly influence the spinnability of ultra high molecular weight PTFE.•Designed a special processing system to melt spin continuous UHMW PTFE fibers.•Significantly increased the critical shear rate of UHMW PTFE.•Experimentally proved that the sequence of spinning and thermal treatment could strongly influence the degree of molecular orientation and the achievable mechanical strength of UHMW PTFE.•Developed a new processing technique to generate continuous UHMW PTFE fibers of 1+ GPa tensile strength.Highly efficient broad-spectrum antibiotic medical dressings•Created a porous, strong, biocompatible wound dressing material from microbial cellulose nanofibers (MCNs).•Activated microbial cellulose nanofibers through high yield surface chemical reactions.•The activated MCNs wound dressings showed extremely high water absorbing ability and exceptional antibiotic activity towards numerous bacteria found in contaminated wound areas. Numerical simulation of amide interchange reaction•Constructed a comprehensive Monte Carlo model to study the effects of polycondensation, hydrolysis, and amide interchange reaction simultaneously. •Theoretically indentified that the number-average segment length was decided by the molar ratio of PA6/PA66.

Hard coatings for metallic devices • Identified the fundamental mechanism of point-like shedding defects in a ceramic coating after prolonged exposure to a high humidity environment.• Developed silane-based coatings for metallic devices. • The new formulation showed a 100% increase in shedding resistance.• Developed and optimized coating procedures through a systematic rheological study. • Created and managed an on-line formulation and coating procedure database to facilitate sharing of information among research laboratory and business divisions.• Participated in cross-functional team meetings and provided technical input for new product development and commercialization.

Atlanta, Georgia , Us

Fabrication of smart implants with graded micro-pores for drug delivery & tissue engineering applications• Developed a new processing technique to fabricate graded micro-porous implants and scaffolds for drugdelivery and tissue engineering applications.• Formulated and compounded/blended new blends/composites (by using nano/micro ceramic and crystalline fillers) to improved the thermal and mechanical stability for producing high quality implants and drug delivery devices in an industrial environment.• Modified and integrated the new processing technique with the traditional injection molding and compression molding techniques to demonstrate the potential for large scale and high speed industrial production.• Incorporated the processing technique with micro hot-embossing (micro replication) technique for continuous mass production of micro-patterned permeable implants and drug delivery devices.• Designed experimental procedures based on statistic models and conducted a thorough study on the thermal annealing kinetics of polymer/plastics blend system and built up relations between the blend morphology and the applied processing conditions.Identified control parameters for the new processing technique utilizing the statistic methodology and structural/thermal analyzing techniques; embedded these parameters into analytical models and CFD (computational fluid dynamics) models to optimize the processing conditions.Polymer Nanocomposites with improved thermal and mechanical stability• Proposed and experimentally demonstrated the feasibility of using nanoclay as a compatibilizer to stabilize the phase morphology of co-continuous polymer blends.• Performed rheological study and SEM & TEM test to understand the fundamental mechanism of the entropy driven stabilization phenomena.• The stabilized nanocomposites showed a significant improvement in resistance to thermal treatment and high shear processing procedures.

• Developed a novel filtration technology which could significantly enhance the filtration efficiency towards submicron size impurities in polymer melts.• This new technology could greatly increase the service life of fiber spinning systems and improve the fiber uniformity.• This invention was jointly patented by Hengli Chemical Fiber Co. Ltd. and Donghua University (Patent number CN201254621).• This research project won the Silver Awards of China National Science and Technology Progress from the Chinese Central Government.

Phd, Material Science And Engineering

Visiting Scholar

Bachelor, Polymer Science And Engineering