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Solid Power picks up speed in quest to deliver on new technology for electric vehicles

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 15:10:26 +0000

Solid Power picks up speed in quest to deliver on new technology for electric vehicles Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/07/2022 - 09:10

Solid Power was founded in 2011 as a spinoff from a research venture of the University of Colorado Boulder.

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Chaney and Wyatt selected for NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 14:53:17 +0000

Chaney and Wyatt selected for NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/25/2022 - 08:53

Jonathan Raab

Tom Chaney

Tom Chaney of the Toney Group and Keenan Wyatt were selected by the National Science Foundation for the Graduate Research Fellowship Program, which provides significant financial support for graduate students engaged in STEM research.

“A NSF graduate fellowship is one of the most prestigious fellowships that a graduate student can receive,” said Professor Stephanie Bryant, director of the Materials Science and Engineering Program. “This fellowship not only recognizes academic excellence, but also recognizes the potential of the student to make a significant impact on society. The MSE program is fortunate to have an amazing group of talented graduate students like Tom and Keenan.”

Tom Chaney, Toney Group

Chaney is working towards developing high performance organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices for renewable energy applications.

“OPVs are solar cells made of an ultrathin film of organic molecules that allows them to be flexible, semi-transparent and lightweight which provide advantages over traditional silicon solar panels in applications such as building integrated photovoltaics,” Chaney said. “My research aims to understand how the morphology, or arrangement of molecules, within the OPV can influence the efficiency of the device, and ultimately how we can modify the chemical structures of the molecules along with processing conditions to optimize the morphology for device efficiency.”

To better understand the structure-processing performance interplay, Chaney utilizes high-intensity X-rays generated by synchrotrons to probe the morphology of these OPV materials during various stages of film formation.

“Measuring how these X-rays scatter through the OPV material reveals information on the arrangement of molecules that will provide a broad understanding of how these films form and explain why performance changes with different chemistries and processing conditions,” he said. “I work closely with a diverse group of skilled researchers in a multi-university team called the Center for Self-Assembled Organic Electronics to rapidly integrate these results into new organic synthesis, computational modeling and device fabrication efforts.”

Keenan Wyatt

Professor Michael Toney is Chaney’s advisor.

“I am very happy to see Tom receive this well-deserved fellowship for his research in organic solar cells and his outreach activities for the university involving the Boulder Valley and Denver school districts,” Toney said. “I expect Tom will accomplish great science over the course of his PhD and throughout his career."

Chaney thanked Toney, his family and his many mentors who helped foster his passion for science.

Keenan Wyatt

Wyatt’s proposal for the NSF GRFP was based on research into metal halide perovskites.

“These are materials that have a lot of hype and promise to become the superior solar photovoltaic technology within the next decade,” Wyatt said. “There are plenty of scientific challenges to overcome with perovskites including stability and environmental safety. In my proposal, I suggested a way to electronically dope the perovskite while simultaneously removing toxic lead from the baseline material. To address the stability issue, I suggested partnering with a computational group to screen for stable and metastable stoichiometries.”

Wyatt thanked several people for their support.

“I would like to thank James Young for giving me the confidence to apply,” he said. “I would like to thank Tim White for assigning a proposal as part of his materials class curriculum and I would like to thank Mike McGehee for unknowingly inspiring the proposal.”

This fellowship program includes an annual stipend of $34,000 for three years, with $12,000 provided to the students’ institution as a cost of education allowance.

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High-Sensitivity Low-Energy Ion Scattering Spectrometer will be a transformative resource for materials research at CU Boulder

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 06:00:00 +0000

High-Sensitivity Low-Energy Ion Scattering Spectrometer will be a transformative resource for materials research at CU Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/01/2022 - 00:00

Jonathan Raab

The HS-LEIS system in the SEEL building on East Campus.

CU Boulder’s East Campus is now home to the High-Sensitivity Low-Energy Ion Scattering (HS-LEIS) Spectrometer, a tool researchers from across the Rocky Mountain region will use for advanced materials characterization and analysis.

Because materials interact with the environment through their surfaces, knowledge of surface properties is critical to understanding structure-function relationships of existing and bespoke, next-generation materials designed for a variety of electronic, optical, biological, chemical and other applications, including functional coatings, photovoltaics, catalysis and more.

Housed in the Sustainability, Energy and Environment Laboratory building on East Campus, the HS-LEIS is the culmination of recent advances in detector design for surface analysis. The device can provide the most sensitive and selective methods for non-destructive, property-dictating, top-atomic-layer surface composition analysis.

“Coupled to this dual instrument system are several sample environments, such that one can expose materials to reactive atmospheres, high temperatures, electrochemical potential and other environments to examine their effect on the surfaces,” said Assistant Professor Adam Holewinski, the lead principal investigator of a team of five researchers who submitted the proposal to bring the instrument to CU Boulder. “This has turned into a rather unique, customized surface analysis platform with broad applicability.”

The HS-LEIS is currently the only device of its kind in the Rocky Mountain region, and only the second in the U.S. It is also unique in that it is complimented by an X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy system, to which it is physically tethered to perform sequential analysis on samples, as well as its unique complement of electrochemical cells. The platform also allows for interfaces with a glass reaction chamber that can reach temperatures up to 1200 degrees Celsius and handle corrosive and reactive gases.

Massimo Ruzzene, the associate dean for research in the College of Engineering and Applied Science, said materials research is and continues to be a strength of our college and the university as a whole.

“This instrument will be a new cornerstone in that area and my hope is it will spur exciting interdisciplinary research efforts on campus and in the region for years to come,” he said.

The acquisition of the HS-LEIS was made possible through a collaborative effort by a group of materials-focused researchers from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, the Department of Chemistry, the Materials Science and Engineering Program and the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute. In 2019, co-principal investigators Tanja Cuk, Steve George, Adam Holewinski, Mike McGehee and Will Medlin developed a proposal that they submitted to the National Science Foundation, which ultimately funded the creation of the platform.

The HS-LEIS will be accessible to CU Boulder researchers and those in academia and industry. For more information, please contact Adam Holewinski.

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Hubler earns NSF CAREER award to advance living building materials

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 15:03:56 +0000

Hubler earns NSF CAREER award to advance living building materials Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/22/2022 - 09:03

Jonathan Raab

Assistant Professor Mija Hubler

Assistant Professor Mija Hubler is a recipient of a three year, $548,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for her proposal “Mechanical Modeling of Living Building Materials for Structural Applications.”

Major advances are being made in the study of living building materials that can be grown in the laboratory and could replace concrete, a significant driver of CO2 emissions in the construction industry

“This research is about creating a mechanical model for living building material,” Hubler said. “The model will enable the design of structures and the engineering of living building material to achieve the desired performance needed for structural applications.”

NSF CAREER awards support early career faculty who are dedicated to research and education. Hubler is using this project to integrate her education and research goals through the study of mechanics in civil infrastructure materials, as well as to improve the recruitment and retention of female and non-traditional students in research and innovation career tracks.

“These activities can help meet a growing workforce demand and support cross-disciplinary innovation for infrastructure materials,” Hubler said. “I hope to grow interest in research careers from a broad audience in this area in part by working with Colorado Mesa University to engage students there in working with living building materials.”

Hubler said that using living building materials for structural applications will help replace concrete as the main building material used in construction today.

“Living building material does not require cement, which is the binding ingredient of concrete that drives its large carbon footprint,” Hubler said. “It is much more crack resistant than concrete and enables material recycling.”

Alternatives to concrete are of interest to civil engineers and the construction industry to address both building durability concerns and CO2 impact. Although past new construction materials have been rejected due to lacking the mechanical properties and behavior of traditional materials, Hubler said living building materials show major promise.

“I have been inspired to better understand what features of the material control the mechanics to engineer new materials to better meet expectations, and also to develop mechanical models of new construction materials to enable them to be adopted into design practices,” Hubler said.

Hubler believes that the model her group will develop will also be applicable to other novel materials, including reinforced metal foams and stabilized soils. She anticipates developing a practical model for living building materials within the next two years, with a five-year goal of using the model to design a full-scale beam composed of living material.

Hubler is a faculty member at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering and the Materials Science and Engineering Program and serves as the Co-Director of the Center for Infrastructure, Energy and Space Testing. Six faculty members within the College of Engineering and Applied Science received CAREER Awards from the National Science Foundation in 2022.

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Alumna Camila Uzcategui earns second place at New Venture Challenge 15 Female Founders Prize Night

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 21:40:35 +0000

Alumna Camila Uzcategui earns second place at New Venture Challenge 15 Female Founders Prize Night Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/16/2022 - 15:40

The new age in entrepreneurial ventures is female-led. From mental health campaigns and apps to data-driven analytics for content creators, the next wave of female-driven innovation was on full display Wednesday night at the New Venture Challenge (NVC) 15 Female Founders Prize Night at Imig Music.

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Rapid growth from a strong foundation - Letter from the Director, Spring 2022

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Rapid growth from a strong foundation - Letter from the Director, Spring 2022 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/24/2022 - 00:00

Stephanie Bryant

The program now boasts its own dedicated faculty offices, graduate student desks and work spaces in the SEEC building on east campus.

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

With this inaugural newsletter, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you a little history of our program and its growth since its inception. I recently became director of the Materials Science and Engineering Program here at CU Boulder in July 2021 and am honored to lead such an outstanding group of faculty and students who are at the forefront of exciting materials research in several critical areas of national interest that range from combating climate change to improving human health outcomes.

While the Materials Science and Engineering Program is relatively new — we founded it in 2013 — research and education in materials has a long and rich history at CU Boulder. Faculty passionate about materials created the program to foster stronger, cross-departmental collaborations in the field and to train the next generation of dedicated materials scientists and engineers. Our graduate degree program arose out of a need to recruit a different type of graduate student — one with a passion and talent for interdisciplinary research, which is critical for success in the materials field.

A state-of-the-art X-ray Diffraction System brings new non-destructive capabilities to determine the structure of a wide variety of materials and material composites.

X-ray photoelectron spectrometry with a UV photoelectron spectrometer (XPS/UPS) coupled to high-sensitive low energy ion scattering (HS-LEIS) spectroscopy will offer unprecedented chemical analysis of the surface of materials undergoing chemical reactions.

Established and early career faculty hires

Our program now proudly boasts more than 50 participating faculty, all of whom offer something unique to the field. In recent years, we have been incredibly fortunate to help bring materials-focused faculty to CU Boulder, including seven senior hires with national recognition as top researchers and educators in materials.

Michael McGehee, Michael Toney, Seth Marder and Joseph Berry strengthen CU Boulder as a leader in materials for renewable and sustainable energy. Soft material researchers like Timothy White, Ryan Hayward and soon-to-be-Assistant Professor Kōnane Bay (starting fall 2022) contribute to a growing center of excellence in this field at our university. The hiring of Jason Burdick — a CU Boulder alumnus — further solidifies CU Boulder as a leader in biomaterials.

Our faculty are recognized for their outstanding materials research, having won eight singular awards from the Materials Research Society (MRS), which is undoubtedly the premier society for our field. Moreover, Kristi Anseth is a past president of MRS and one of only a few in the world elected to all three national academies: the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Science (NAS) and Medicine (NAM). The Society for Biomaterials has honored several of our faculty with prestigious awards going back to 2005, with the Clemson Award going to Chris Bowman, who is one of the founders of our MSE Program and a NAE and NAM member. Most recently, their 2020 Founders Award went to Professor Anseth.

Our faculty are truly outstanding, with over half of them receiving national recognition through early career awards, including three PECASE winners and five being elected to the National Academy of Inventors: professors Anseth, Bowman, Burdick, Marder and Noble. The materials community at CU Boulder boasts four NAS members: professors Anseth, Clark, Kapteyn and Murnane.

Industry applications

Our faculty and students are also developing emergent technologies that have led to numerous commercialization successes. Examples include Colorado Photopolymer Solutions, which recently merged with Arkema. Solid Power Inc. is leading the industry in solid-state batteries for electric cars. One of our newest companies, TYNT Technologies, is developing energy-efficient dynamic windows. Together, the materials community at CU Boulder is making a real impact in industry and beyond.

New facilities at SEEC

Faculty recruitment and success are not the only areas in which MSE has grown. Recently, work was completed on a beautifully renovated, dedicated space in the Sustainability, Energy & Environment Community (SEEC) Building, which now houses our program offices, a community shared space, conference rooms for breakout discussions and dedicated desk space for our graduate students.

Focus on graduate student success

New lab spaces for innovative materials science and engineering work are coming online.

The heart of our community remains our graduate program and students. They make what we do here special — from the incredible, cross-disciplinary research they conduct to the social and mentoring activities they organize with one another. I encourage you to read our student profiles on our website, which highlight many of our diverse and accomplished students in our program. A few examples include NSF Fellow Danielle Beatty, Emmanuel Bamidele, who hails from Akure, Nigeria, and GAANN fellow Melvin Colorado Escobar. Our program began with the enrollment of just two students in 2013 and has since flourished to over 70 MS and PhD candidates currently in the program. This alone is worth celebrating.

Going forward, we plan to send out newsletters in the fall and spring semesters. We are excited to share all the great news and happenings in MSE, from student achievements to faculty research and special events. Thank you for being part of our journey.

Sincerely,

Professor Stephanie Bryant
Director, Materials Science and Engineering Program

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Ferguson elected to AIMBE College of Fellows

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 18:06:36 +0000

Ferguson elected to AIMBE College of Fellows Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/18/2022 - 11:06

Rachel Leuthauser

Biomedical Engineering Professor Virginia Ferguson has been elected to the distinguished American Institute for Medical and Biomedical Engineering’s College of Fellows.

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Dr. Wil Srubar: Concrete has a colossal carbon footprint and we can help fix that in Colorado

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 21:56:25 +0000

Dr. Wil Srubar: Concrete has a colossal carbon footprint and we can help fix that in Colorado Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/17/2022 - 14:56

If Colorado truly envisions itself to be a bold leader on tackling climate change, our state must have a strategy for decarbonizing concrete. Although concrete is not always top of mind, this critical building block presents a wealth of opportunities for sustainability and business innovation — as well as reducing harmful emissions.

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Seed grant opens research into future of construction materials, site tools

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 20:31:06 +0000

Seed grant opens research into future of construction materials, site tools Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/11/2022 - 13:31

Researchers at CU Boulder are developing an app that could reliably and quickly predict whether batches of concrete made at construction sites are safe. If successful, the work could usher in a new era of building that is faster, more cost effective and safer overall for everyone.

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Cuk Research Group isolates reaction step that describes energetics of catalysis on materials

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 16:39:49 +0000

Cuk Research Group isolates reaction step that describes energetics of catalysis on materials Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/16/2021 - 09:39

Jonathan Raab

Associate Professor Tanja Cuk

New research published in Nature Materials from Associate Professor Tanja Cuk and colleagues sheds light on a fundamental chemical reaction — the breaking apart of water to produce a molecular fuel such as hydrogen. Cuk is faculty in the Department of Chemistry and the Materials Science and Engineering Program (MSE) and is a Fellow in the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI).

When water undergoes such a reaction, there are a number of discrete reaction steps that should occur in sequence. Cuk’s lab specializes in timing these steps and therefore isolating individual reactions as part of the broader process.

“This paper isolated one of the reaction steps in time, so we can then learn more about the energetics of that discrete step — how strong or weak the bonds are before and after it — within the broader reaction,” Cuk said.

Understanding the free energy needed to form a chemical is key to its usefulness as a fuel source. If an element has weak electrochemical bonds, it has a high-energy potential, because it can be broken apart easily.

“Similar to what plants do naturally, we are trying to break the bonds of water and reform the bonds of oxygen,” Cuk said. “The protons left over create hydrogen for fuel.”

Cuk and her group used a pulsing photovoltaic effect to generate current and a tuning of the water’s pH to get more products of the first step — reaction intermediates — with higher pH. This creates a curve — the reaction isotherm of Figure 4 in the manuscript and depicted in Figure 1, right — from which the free energy change of that reaction step can be determined.

Figure 1. The time-resolved optical data as a function of pH (litmus scale on the bottom) show how the population of intermediates generates a reaction isotherm (black trace). The emission (in blue) counts the intermediate population (cartooned) and from its growth, one obtains the free energy change for the first electron transfer from water. Figure constructed with the aid of Daniel Morton of RASEI.

“The electrochemical reaction was driven by the charge,” Cuk said. “We have an electrode and we shine light on it. That is the energy inputted into the whole reaction. But we shine pulsed light, so we can time the separate reaction steps within the total fuel-producing reaction.”

Because sunlight is continuous, it can obscure the individual steps associated with a chemical reaction. Using pulsed light in principle allows the researchers to experimentally determine the free energy needed for each meta-stable reaction step. However, a pulsed light spectroscopy, usually called pump-probe or time-resolved spectroscopy, had yet to live up to this.

This work experimentally determined the free energy change of the first electron and proton transfer from water at a material surface. This understanding is especially important for materials science because theorists use it to differentiate the activity of water splitting catalysts. If this is a difficult, energy-intensive process, the catalyst is not as efficient at producing the final fuel, hydrogen.

Ilya Vinogradov, a postdoctoral researcher in the Cuk Research Group and with RASEI, contributed to building the transient reflectance setup, wrote new data acquisition software and mentored the graduate students in data acquisition and analysis. MSE graduate students Suryansh Suryansh and Hanna Lyle acquired the data and processed the data sets. Michael Paolino, a graduate student in Physics, aided in the latest data collection. Vinogradov furthered the SVD analysis spearheaded by Research Associate Aritra Mandal and contributed to the rotation analysis described in Figure 2.

“This research is impactful because it provides an experimental measure of an important theoretical materials performance predictor — free energy change of the first electron transfer step — for water splitting catalysis,” Vinogradov said. “If a material’s descriptor correlates well with device performance, one can computationally optimize its chemical composition and crystal structure for the descriptor in lieu of directly measuring the device’s performance.”

This allows researchers to evaluate different materials as high performers more efficiently and quickly, saving time and cost for materials that would otherwise need to be subject to experimentation.

“Although our method is not quite there yet in terms of throughput and precision, one way a more solid experimental footing may help improve the materials design strategy is by discovering non-idealities that the theorists may have missed,” Vinogradov said. “This can help improve the descriptor's predictive accuracy.”

Cuk said some of these non-idealities would have to do with the reaction kinetics, or the timing with which the intermediate products turn over, rather than directly with the free energies of each reaction step.

“This is important for a truly sustainable energy storage cycle, where the rate at which products turnover keeps up with the rate at which rays of sunlight come in,” she said. “By using a time-resolved spectroscopy, we can get at both the free energies and the rates that circumscribe fuel production.”

New research published in Nature Materials from Associate Professor Tanja Cuk and colleagues sheds light on a fundamental chemical reaction — the breaking apart of water to produce a molecular fuel such as hydrogen. Cuk is faculty in the Department of Chemistry and the Materials Science and Engineering Program (MSE) and is a Fellow in the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI).

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