«It was a challenging optimization problem to solve accurately,» said Kazuhiro Saitou,
a U-M mechanical engineering professor and the other co-author of the Environmental Research Letters paper.
The team — which also includes
U-M associate
professor of
mechanical engineering Kevin Pipe,
mechanical engineering graduate researcher Chen Li and materials science and
engineering graduate student Apoorv Shanker — used a chemical process to expand and straighten the molecule chains.