Nature builds many of its most functional materials far from equilibrium. Bone, wood and folded biological tissues owe much of their performance to hierarchical architectures that span many length scales, built through growth, mass transport and mechanical instabilities rather than equilibrium assembly. In such systems, structure is set not by energy minimization but by the forces that drive them out of equilibrium, such as chemical and temperature gradients, flow and rapid mass transfer.
Milana Trifkovic,
University of Calgary
Synthetic soft materials offer a route to interconnected architectures: melt mixing of immiscible polymers produces co-continuous morphologies, and spinodal decomposition of partially miscible liquids yields bicontinuous domains. These morphologies, however, are thermodynamically unfavourable, and in the melt or liquid state interfacial tension continuously drives their coarsening. Arresting a target microstructure before it coarsens would give access to hierarchically structured materials through scalable processes such as extrusion and solvent casting.
We have been studying how nanoparticle networks can arrest these structures, and how rheology can predict when it will succeed. Using confocal rheology, which combines melt-state confocal imaging with oscillatory rheometry, we have followed the coarsening of co-continuous blends in real time and identified rheological signatures of distinct coarsening regimes and of particle network formation. These signatures guide the design of co- and tri-continuous blend nanocomposites as sacrificial templates: removing the polymer phases leaves binder-free, hierarchically porous scaffolds of silica or carbon black, which we are exploring for thermal energy storage.
We extended this approach to bicontinuous emulsion gels formed by phase separation of water/2,6-lutidine mixtures. Here, chitin nanocrystals partition into and jam within the water-rich phase, and asymmetric solvent loss during drying generates compressive stresses that buckle the jammed network. A rheological measure of the extent of jamming predicts which compositions wrinkle, yielding substrate-free, bio-based wrinkled surfaces with improved triboelectric output. I will conclude with next steps, including tri-continuous templates for three-dimensional battery electrodes and structured catalyst layers for fuel cells.
Milana Trifkovic is a Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Calgary, where she holds the UCalgary Research Excellence Chair and serves as Associate Dean of Research, Innovation and Strategic Partnerships. She received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario and was an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Minnesota. Her group studies structure–property relationships in complex fluids, with a focus on far-from-equilibrium materials, soft matter templating and rheology. She co-founded EnviCore, a cleantech startup that converts industrial waste into low-carbon cementitious materials and was named the Canadian National Winner in the Net-Zero Industries Mission “Outstanding Projects”at COP30. She is Deputy Editor of Physics of Fluids and received the 2026 Stanley G. Mason Award from the Canadian Society of Rheology.