Anton Peterlin

Research Triangle Institute

September 25, 1908 – March 24, 1993

Physicist

Awarded Bingham Medal 1970

Dr. Anton Peterlin was a Slovenian born physicist who received his master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Ljubljana in 1930 and his DSc in physics from the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1938. He then returned to the University of Ljubljana and founded the physics department there, where he worked as a professor and chair of the department from 1939-1960. He had a yearlong teaching position at the Technical University in Munich and then moved to the United States in 1961 where he worked from 1961-1973 at the Camille Dreyfus Laboratory at the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina. In 1973, Peterlin accepted a research position at NIST, where he worked until 1990 when he retired.

Peterlin’s research was heavily focused on the dynamics of polymer solutions. His work on streaming birefringence in dilute solutions of colloids and polymer molecules earned him his doctorate. Later in his career, he focused on folded-chain morphology of polymers and developed the “Peterlin Model” which describes plastic deformation of partially crystalline polymers. He developed an approximate closure for the second moment tensor arising from the ensemble average of the nonlinear force-orientation distribution product that arises in the kinetic theory of dumbbell models for dilute polymers in solution. The ‘-P’ appended in the familiar ‘FENE-P model’ reflects Peterlin’s singular contribution to making early computations with the finitely extensible nonlinear elastic dumbbell model possible. He was awarded the Bingham Medal for his work with “the theoretical and experimental problems of the rheo-optical properties of dilute polymer solutions.” (Physics Today 1970).

Sources

Society of Rheology Honors Peterlin with Bingham Medal. Physics Today 1970, 23(11), 67. Go to link.

Crist, Buckley. Anton Peterlin. Physics Today 1994, 47(9), 118. Go to link.

Photo Credit

Peterlin Anton A1, AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.