Lehigh's Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) Professor Thomas Gartner was an invited keynote speaker at the 5th Engineering Cosmetics and Consumer Products (ECCP) conference this spring. The 2-day AIChE-affiliated conference brings together scientists, engineers, and academic researchers to present and learn on topics of Sustainability in Formulated Product Design. It is also an opportunity to highlight new technologies and manufacturing approaches throughout the consumer products space with focuses on novel materials, product engineering, process scale-up, and regulations & safety. Attendees were a mix of academia (faculty and students), industry (from startups to large companies), and nonprofits.
Gartner's talk entitled "Predicting the thermodynamics of formulations via machine learning-enhanced theoretical tools" connected his fundamental work on theory and simulations of polymer systems to the multi-billion dollar industry of polymer-based consumer products such as lotions, cosmetics, and hair care products. Existing computational tools are traditionally cumbersome and difficult to apply to the complex multi-component systems of consumer product formulations. Augmented with machine learning techniques that are trained by more fundamental calculations, he further explained how these techniques can be more rapidly applied to these complex systems to predict properties of soft matter. This allows prediction of phase behavior of these systems to understand how they are processed and whether they are stable, potentially enhancing process efficiency, reducing waste, and predicting longer-time properties of products as-formulated to understand their shelf-stability. These techniques also can be used to rapidly prototype formulation properties for new products as the industry shifts from traditional polymers and surfactants to those that are more environmentally friendly.
Other invited speakers included Professor Daeyeon Lee from the University of Pennsylvania and industry leaders from Dow Chemical, Ashland, and former Lehigh postdoctoral researcher Dr. Xue Li at International Flavors and Fragrances.
