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About him:

“Being always attracted by science, Andrea Maslov starts his academic journey in 2014 at the faculty of Chemistry in Rome at La Sapienza University.  After completing his bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 2017, he kept following his passion at the same faculty obtaining a master’s degree on the Physical Chemistry track.  During this time, he worked as a lab assistant and also had the privilege to be enrolled as an Erasmus student twice, firstly at the University of Amsterdam as an exchange student, and then at the University of Barcelona as a research associate to carry on his thesis’s work on the performances of novel nanomaterials for biogas upgrading. In those years he built his knowledge on molecular modeling through the use of ab initio calculation and Molecular Dynamics simulations. Since September 2021, he is part of the SURFICE consortium at KU Leuven, his role in the project is to model the heterogeneous nucleation of ice at the nanoscale using a Molecular Dynamics approach”

Goals in the project

The project focus on developing a theoretical framework to observe the heterogeneous ice nucleation, at the nanoscale level, on different kind of non-ideal substrates.  Furthermore, a full characterization of the icing phenomena will be provided, from the moment when a water droplet enters in contact with a given cold surface, to when it starts to nucleate on top, and eventually, also the melting process will be analyzed.  The key parameters of the process will be obtained: from the water contact angle at different degrees of supercooling, the nucleation rates, the melting speed, and also how the substrate’s morphology influences the nucleation phenomena.  The main technique that will be used is Molecular Dynamics, a powerful tool that is able to provide insights on the icing process that might be otherwise challenging to measure experimentally.