Researchers at Georgia Tech will work to develop new controllable materials for 3D printing, electronics made from plastics, and semiconductors that convert infrared light into electrical signals as part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) efforts to create advanced materials.

Altogether, the agency is investing $3 million in the three projects led by faculty members in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering (ME) and the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE). Georgia Tech is a contributing partner on a fourth project led by Notre Dame researchers to explore materials that can be switched from an insulator to a metal with an external trigger.

The new awards are part of NSF’s Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program, which is intended to discover and create advanced materials twice as fast and at a fraction of the cost of traditional research methods.

Read more about the researchers' plans on the College of Engineering website.

A new kind of polymer membrane created by researchers at Georgia Tech could reshape how refineries process crude oil, dramatically reducing the energy and water required while extracting even more useful materials.

The so-called DUCKY polymers — more on the unusual name in a minute — are reported Oct. 16 in Nature Materials. And they’re just the beginning for the team of Georgia Tech chemists, chemical engineers, and materials scientists. They also have created artificial intelligence tools to predict the performance of these kinds of polymer membranes, which could accelerate development of new ones.

The implications are stark: the initial separation of crude oil components is responsible for roughly 1% of energy used across the globe. What’s more, the membrane separation technology the researchers are developing could have several uses, from biofuels and biodegradable plastics to pulp and paper products.

“We're establishing concepts here that we can then use with different molecules or polymers, but we apply them to crude oil because that's the most challenging target right now,” said M.G. Finn, professor and James A. Carlos Family Chair in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Research faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology now have their own advocacy group. Since 2022, the Research Faculty Advisory Council (RFAC) has increased research faculty engagement and addressed concerns from researchers in the Interdisciplinary Research Institutes (IRIs), joining similar organizations that address such needs in other colleges.

The group addresses issues such as retention, professional development, recognition, and compensation. Julia Kubanek, vice president for Interdisciplinary Research (VPIR), formed the group after hearing feedback from research faculty and modeled it after a similar council in the College of Sciences.

“This advisory council has helped clarify how we can improve both the status and experience of research faculty on campus,” Kubanek said. “The recommendations they’ve provided and the initiatives they’ve launched are already making a difference.”

The 12 members are nominated from across the IRIs, plus two other interdisciplinary research units supported by the VPIR. These members include:

• Vishwadeep Ahluwalia (Center for Advanced Brain Imaging)
• Michael Chang (Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems)
• Sriram Chockalingam (Institite for Data Engineering and Science)
• Christine Conwell (Strategic Energy Institute)
• Andrew Dugenske (Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute)
• Ulrika Egertsdotter (Renewable Bioproducts Institute)
• Evan Goldberg (Global Center for Medical Innovation )
• Walter Henderson (Institute for Materials)
• Johannes Leisen (Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience)
• Paul Joseph (Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology)
• Leanne West (Pediatric Technology Center)
• Clint Zeagler (Institute for People and Technology)

In its first year, RFAC had two co-leads: Andrew Dugenske, the director of the Factory Information Systems Center and a principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, and Paul Joseph, a principal research scientist and director of External User Programs for Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor.

“Although the research faculty contribute significantly to the overall growth of Georgia Tech, we remain largely underrepresented, unrecognized, and underemployed because of the lack of suitable platforms to talk about the challenges faced by research faculty colleagues,” Joseph said. “It was not a surprise that the same concerns surfaced and were discovered by the council when we collected input from the research faculty throughout the IRIs on issues that concern and are important to research faculty.”

Although Joseph and Dugenske have completed their terms in their leadership roles, they are satisfied with RFAC’s initial success in creating awareness of research faculty challenges on campus, and initiatives that include a mentorship program with the Research Next team, a Research Faculty Mentoring Network, and efforts in RFAC bylaws creation. Leanne West and Walter Henderson now serve as co-leads.

“It was great for the administration to recognize the many contributions that research faculty make to the Institute and establish a way to improve research faculty job satisfaction and engagement,” Dugenske said. “During the first year of the RFAC, the committee did a great job of gathering issues of importance to research faculty and presenting clear and actionable recommendations to decision-makers.”

Natalie Stingelin, chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering, has been elected to the European Academy of Sciences (EURASC). The honor is bestowed upon the most distinguished European scholars and engineers for their research and contributing to the development of advanced technologies. Each honoree also displays a strong commitment to promoting science and technology in Europe.

Stingelin is recognized for her significant contributions in the broader areas of polymer physics, functional macromolecular materials, and organic electronics and photonics as well as her strong devotion and conviction to generating a notable impact on the wider engineering field as a role model for women in STEM.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

MSE Professor Blair Brettmann and CHBE doctoral student Alexa Dobbs decided to spend a summer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to collaborate with the Lab’s materials science experts and learn more about LLNL’s experimental resources. During Brettmann’s faculty mini-sabbatical, she collaborated with researchers from LLNL’s Energetic Materials Center to refine material manufacturing techniques.

According to LLNL materials scientist Kyle Sullivan, who sponsored Brettmann’s mini-sabbatical, she helped his team take a fresh look at their methodology, enabling them to identify ways to streamline a highly complex process.

“Many of our material development activities start with multi-faceted problems,” Sullivan said. “We were eager to draw from Blair’s experience in pharmaceutical manufacturing to help us identify an efficient methodology to apply to our research.”

Brettmann’s research focuses on material processing, including how a material’s properties influence the optimal processing approach, as well as how novel processing techniques can be used to develop materials with the features needed for specific applications. Her goal is to better understand options for real-time monitoring of material processing, including effective data collection tools, as well as knowing which experimental data would be beneficial to analyze. As she heads back to Georgia Tech to start another academic year, Brettmann is hoping that the insight she gained during her mini-sabbatical will help her research team as they test new analytical techniques for their material formulation experiments.

Dobbs spent her summer at LLNL investigating material formulation techniques. She helped design and conduct experiments that explored ways to optimize material mixing and she developed a new process for analyzing experimental data. During her internship, Dobbs met with LLNL experts in materials processing and advanced manufacturing, who helped her frame her experiments.

“It was great to expand my understanding of the entire manufacturing process and learn about key challenges in the field," Dobbs said. “The opportunity to spend time with energetics experts was one of the highlights of my internship experience.”

Read the full article

This is part three of the student experiences series. Erin Phillips, rising fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in chemistry and biochemisty shares her experience from the 2023 RBI Spring Workshop on "Innovations in Packaging and Circular Economy."

Tell us about yourself. 

My name is Erin Phillips, and I am a rising fourth-year Ph.D. student here at Georgia Tech. I graduated with my bachelor's from Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, in 2020. I am a student in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, but I am co-advised by Carsten Sievers in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Marta Hatzell in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. The title for my thesis project is "Mechanochemical Depolymerization of Lignin and Lignin Model Compounds." I am currently writing a JACS Communication about the cleavage of the lignin model compound benzyl phenyl ether, which represents the B-O-4 bond found within lignin. 

How was your experience at the RBI workshop? 

I thought the workshop was fantastic! I really enjoyed the interdisciplinary focus of the event, which allowed for greater networking opportunities between departments. 

What was your main takeaway from the poster session? 

During the poster session, it was great to see what other PSE (Paper Science and Engineering) fellows were currently working on. We often all take classes together and pass each other in RBI, but it was nice to actually see everyone's work laid out and visually represented. I also enjoyed talking with a few people from the industry about their expectations in terms of hiring after graduate school and what a realistic position in an industry setting would entail. 

What more would you like to see in future events at the Renewable Bioproducts Institute? 

I think the greatest thing RBI can do is to continue to allow for PSE fellows to build contacts that we may not normally have access to during our day-to-day lives in RBI. Many of us want to continue in our field of research after leaving Georgia Tech, so events like the RBI workshop are a great experience to connect with others who share our interest and could help provide opportunities after completing the program.

Who We Are and the Paper Museum

The Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking houses hand papermaking artifacts from around the world. Dard Hunter, a renowned paper historian and founder of the museum, collected many of these objects throughout the early 1900s as he sought to gain more knowledge about this craft. Nearly 100 years later, the museum continues its mission to collect, preserve, increase, and disseminate knowledge about papermaking to the general public. By collaborating with Georgia Tech researchers, and the larger Atlanta community, by using scientific tools, we can unlock hidden information held within the objects, both from a historical and scientific perspective. Recently, two Georgia Tech Postdoctoral Fellows, Nasreen Khan (Paper Museum/RBI) and Daniel Vallejo (School of Chemistry and Biochemistry) sought to uncover more about a loom in the museum’s collection, connected with the history of the Indian subcontinent and Gandhi.

Dard Hunter and Background of the Loom

In the 1930s, Dard Hunter traveled to Asia and the Indian subcontinent (I.e., India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir) to document hand papermaking techniques and collect tools and paper samples. At that time many people, including Mahatma Gandhi, aimed to revitalize the Indian hand papermaking tradition by supporting and creating schools to teach the craft [1-3]. Dard Hunter visited several papermaking villages and schools, including those helped founded by Gandhi. Hunter brought a loom back to America that was used to weave a chapri (paper-mold cover or screen), but the information of the specific origins of this loom was lost.

What’s Missing?

While Hunter and other researchers documented and studied hand papermaking tools and materials of this region and time, it was primarily from a historical and cultural perspective [1-5]. Much of their focus has been on the plant materials used to make the paper and molds [1-5]. However, some parts of the handmade molds in Asia were known to also use biological materials sourced from animals, such as silk and animal hair [1-4]. Since the exact origin of the loom and the fibers used to construct the paper mold was not known, the museum was interested in learning more about this object.

With scientific tools, the study aimed to understand more about the fibers commonly used in traditional handmade paper-mold covers in the 1930s Indian subcontinent by using scientific tools. With the availability of high-resolution microscopy technologies and historical documentation at Georgia Tech and the Museum, researchers aimed to either prove or disprove whether the origin of preserved fibers on the loom was from an animal and determine with historical context where the loom was acquired.

What we did and what we discovered

Are the Fibers Really Horsehair?

In forensic analysis, typically the first step to identify unknown fiber or hair samples is to conduct microscopy. Microscopy, or the science of using microscopes to view samples & objects that cannot be seen with the naked eye, is the gold standard for analyzing and identifying unknown fibers by comparison to a library of known reference materials. This is possible because hair from different sources or animals have different “morphologies”, or physical features, that help identify their origin. Thanks to the Materials Innovation and Learning Laboratory (MILL), a hub of scientific equipment for hands-on scientific training of undergraduates at Georgia Tech, the researchers were able to use two different microscope techniques: Light microscopy and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). Thanks to Little Creek Farm Conservancy in Decatur and Kristine Parson, the researchers were able to obtain reference materials for tail and mane horsehair from two horses: Angus and Lightening.

Click the link below to continue reading the story.

The water coming out of your faucet is safe to drink, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely clean. Chlorine has long been the standard for water treatment, but it often contains trace levels of disinfection byproducts and unknown contaminants. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers developed the minus approach to handle these harmful byproducts.

Instead of relying on traditional chemical addition (known as the plus approach), the minus approach avoids disinfectants, chemical coagulants, and advanced oxidation processes typical to water treatment processes. It uses a unique mix of filtration methods to remove byproducts and pathogens, enabling water treatment centers to use ultraviolet light and much smaller doses of chemical disinfectants to minimize future bacterial growth down the distribution system.

“The minus approach is a groundbreaking philosophical concept in water treatment,” said Yongsheng Chen, the Bonnie W. and Charles W. Moorman IV Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Its primary objective is to achieve these outcomes while minimizing the reliance on chemical treatments, which can give rise to various issues in the main water treatment stream.”

Chen and his student Elliot Reid, the primary author, presented the minus approach in the paper, “The Minus Approach Can Redefine the Standard of Practice of Drinking Water Treatment,” in The American Chemical Society.

The minus approach physically separates emerging contaminants and disinfection byproducts from the main water treatment process using these already proven processes:

• Bank filtration withdraws water from naturally occurring or constructed banks like rivers or lakes. As the water travels through the layers of soil and gravel, it naturally filters out impurities, suspended particles, and certain microorganisms.
• Biofiltration uses biological processes to treat water by passing it through filter beds made of sand, gravel, or activated carbon that can support the growth of beneficial microorganisms, which in turn can remove contaminants.  
• Adsorption occurs when an adsorbent material like activated carbon is used to trap contaminants.
• Membrane filtration uses a semi-permeable membrane to separate particles and impurities from the main treatment process.

The minus approach is intended to engage the water community in designing safer, more sustainable, and more intelligent systems. Because its technologies are already available and proven, the minus approach can be implemented immediately.

It can also integrate with artificial intelligence (AI) to improve filtration’s effectiveness. AI can aid process optimization, predictive maintenance, faulty detection and diagnosis, energy optimization, and decision-support systems. AI models have also been able to reliably predict the origin of different types of pollution in source water, and models have also successfully detected pipeline damage and microbial contamination, allowing for quick and efficient maintenance.

“This innovative philosophy seeks to revolutionize traditional water treatment practices by providing a more sustainable and environmentally friendly solution,” Chen said. “By reducing the reliance on chemical treatments, the minus approach mitigates the potential risks associated with the use of such chemicals, promoting a safer water supply for both human consumption and environmental protection.”

CITATION: Elliot Reid, Thomas Igou, Yangying Zhao, John Crittenden, Ching-Hua Huang, Paul Westerhoff, Bruce Rittmann, Jörg E. Drewes, and Yongsheng Chen

Environmental Science & Technology 2023 57 (18), 7150-7161

DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.2c09389