报告题目： Structural Thermodynamics
（University of California at Riverside）
报告时间： 2015年11月26日（周四）下午2:30
报告人简介：Dr. Jianzhong Wu is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and a cooperating faculty member in the Mathematics Department at the University of California at Riverside. He obtained PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, MS and BE degrees in Chemical Engineering and BS degree in Applied Mathematics from Tsinghua University at Beijing. Dr. Wu has published over 150 peer-reviewed scientific articles in diverse fields of chemical physics, chemical engineering, and theoretical chemistry. His research is focused on the development and application of liquid-state methods, in particular density functional theory, to study phase transitions and the physicochemical properties of confined fluids, soft materials and biomolecular systems.
Classical thermodynamics is concerned with the fundamental laws of nature and quantitative relations among different macroscopic variables such as different forms of free energy, temperature, pressure and chemical composition. Its practical applications hinge on experimental data for the calorimetric and/or volumetric properties of specific macroscopic systems under consideration, or on statistical-mechanical models that connect those properties with the microscopic constituents and dynamic behavior. Whereas thermodynamic properties are inevitably dependent on the structure or atomistic distributions of specific macroscopic systems, classical thermodynamics entails neither the microscopic structure nor structure-property relationships. Structural thermodynamics is built upon a formally exact mathematical framework to quantify the microscopic structure along with the macroscopic properties of thermodynamic systems following the variational principle of equilibrium. It represents a generalization of the classical thermodynamics with the structure as a fundamental variable augmented with explicit structure-property relationships. This talk introduces the basic ingredients of structural thermodynamics and its connections with conventional statistical-mechanical theories and the density functional theory. Illustrative examples will be given in terms of both phenomenological models and theoretical formalisms for understanding self-assembly and phase transitions in complex molecular systems and for high-throughput molecular screening and materials design.
