MSE Department Seminar

The synergy between the smart materials – power source – self-powered systems has provided the paradigm of “self-sustainable component and systems” for innovation driving the emergence of efficient and high-performance architectures. There is significant reduction in size and weight of the self-sustainable architectures as compared to traditional “grid-powered” or battery-powered devices. Some examples illustrating these self-sustainable architectures will be provided in this presentation covering solar, thermal, magnetic field and vibration energy harvesting.

Conductive polymer composites have been developed for electrostatic discharge and electromagnetic interference shielding. Loadings of >10% conductive fillers are typically required, but such loading levels result in high melt viscosity, poor appearance, contamination by sloughed off fillers and high material cost. We have found that small amounts of graphene nanoplatelets, 0.06 wt%, if located at the interfaces in a cocontinuous polymer blend, can percolate resulting in useful conductive composites.

In small enough semiconductor devices, the electron mean free path for collisions with impurities or lattice vibrations greatly exceeds the device size. Hence, the electrons travelling with the thermal or Fermi velocity leave the active region of the device before they experience scattering. Such collisionless electron transport is called “ballistic”. The electron mean free path in silicon at room temperature is on the order of 30 nm. This is much greater than the 7 or 10 nm feature size of modern silicon CMOS used, for example, in the recent generations of iPhones or android phones.

This lecture will detail the creation of ultrasensitive sensors based on carbon nanotubes (CNTs).  A central concept that a single nano- or molecular-wire spanning between two electrodes would create an exceptional sensor if binding of a molecule of interest to it would block all electronic transport. Nanowire networks of CNTs provide for a practical approximation to the single nanowire scheme.

This seminar covers our group’s recent work on novel 2D nanomaterials development and mechanical energy harvesting device innovations. In the first half, I will present an ionic layer epitaxy (ILE) technique that uses surfactant monolayers to serve as soft templates guiding the nucleation and growth of 2D nanomaterials in large area beyond the limitation of van der Waals solids. Through this approach, 1 to 2 nm thick, single-crystalline free-standing ZnO nanosheets with sizes up to tens of microns were synthesized at the water-air interface.

The incompatibility of the energy of a solar photon and the absorption band of a chemical bond prevents the use of light to activate the chemical bond for interesting chemical reactions directly. This presentation will focus on a strategy that enables the efficient coupling of photon energy into chemical bonds to selectively promote the desired chemical reactions.

Phononic band gaps – the analogous to electronic band gaps in semiconductors – are frequencies ranges for which vibrations are not allowed to propagate in periodic structures. In contrast to well-understood electronic and photonic band gaps, being able to achieve forbidden frequency ranges for thermal phonons has been more challenging. In this talk, I discuss recent developments to understand and control the transport of thermal vibrations by wave interference and band gaps.

Chirality is fundamental to many physical, chemical, and biological systems, impacting processes as diverse as pharmaceutical-cell interactions to the evolution of species. Measuring molecular chirality is especially important to synthesize chiral compounds, study enzymatic interactions, and understand dynamic protein folding and DNA hybridization. Current methods to measure molecular chirality rely on ensemble techniques such as circular dichroism spectroscopy. However, these techniques require large analyte concentrations and relatively long integration times.

High heat fluxes and increased temperatures have led to major road blocks in the advancement of materials and technologies. For example, high frequency devices and optical links, energy storage and conversion devices, and high power laser systems have all demonstrated thermal failures that prevent functional material composites from reaching their full theoretical potential. These composites devices rely on a multitude of thin film materials with varying levels of dopants and defects in addition to a high density of material interfaces.

Strength is one of the most important material properties in engineering applications. With the advanced design of nano-materials and nano-structures, the corresponding computational and theoretical modeling techniques are required in order to optimize the structure design and predicate the enhanced material properties.