Jie Wu, an engineering graduate student, was studying a type of striking white beetle found in Southeast Asia and attempting to figure out how to mimic its brilliant color when an unexpected discovery upended the experiment.

Jie and I had been hoping to identify naturally occurring whitening pigments that could be used in paper and paints. The beetle’s white exoskeleton is made from a compound called chitin, which is a type of carbohydrate – one that is also commonly found in crab and lobster shells.

First, Jie extracted chitin nanofibers from crab shells obtained from food waste that are chemically the same as those found in the white beetles. But instead of creating a white material as intended, Jie produced dense, transparent films. The nanofibers more readily assembled in tightly packed films than in the porous structures Jie desired.

On a whim, Jie measured the rate at which oxygen passed through the film. The result was astonishing: The barrier allowed less oxygen through than many existing packaging plastics.

That serendipitous finding in 2014 shifted my team of engineering students’ focus from color to packaging. We asked whether natural materials could rival the performance of common plastics. In the years since, our team has used this discovery to create biodegradable films that offer a more sustainable and effective alternative to plastic packaging.

Challenges of Plastic Packaging

Plastic packaging is commonly used to protect food, pharmaceuticals and personal care products. These plastics keep out moisture and oxygen from the air, so products stay fresh and safe.

Most packaging has several layers that work together to keep air out, but these layers hinder reuse and recycling efforts. As a result, most of this plastic barrier packaging is discarded to landfills as single-use materials.

Many researchers have sought alternatives that are renewable, biodegradable or recyclable, yet just as effective. At Georgia Tech, my team of students and post-docs has spent more than a decade tackling this problem. This journey began with that beetle.

Building a Better Barrier

Chitin is widely available in food waste and mushrooms, and it is used in products such as water filters and wound dressing. However, our early attempts to scale up the film technology based on the beetle-inspired experiment failed.

In 2018, the team made an important leap forward by using spray coating to create layers of chitin and cellulose nanomaterials. Cellulose, like chitin, is a carbohydrate polymer – a chain of repeating carbohydrate units – and it is obtained from plants. These abundant natural materials have opposite electric charges, which led to better barrier performance when we combined them than either material alone.

In this approach, the team sprayed down a layer of chitin, followed by a layer of cellulose. The opposite charges between the chitin and cellulose created a long-range attraction between them that binds the layers to create a dense interface.

Later, in collaboration with Meisha Shofner, a materials scientist, and Tequila Harris, a mechanical engineer, other students showed these coatings could be applied with scalable, roll-to-roll techniques. Roll-to-roll coating methods are preferred in industry because the coatings are applied continuously to large rolls of a substrate material, such as paper or other biodegradable plastics.

Still, humidity posed a major challenge, limiting any real-world applications. Moisture swelled the film, allowing more oxygen to sneak through.

Then came another breakthrough. In 2024, another collaborator, Natalie Stingelin, and I discovered that two common food components resisted water vapor when combined: carboxymethylcellulose – which is found in ice cream, for example – and citric acid.

The result was a film that hindered the transmission of moisture. The citric acid reacted with the cellulose to form cross-links, which are chemical junctions that bind the cellulose molecules. Once bound, they reduced the film’s moisture uptake.

We integrated this new discovery with the prior work by combining the citric acid and cellulose, and then casting this mixture as a freestanding film by coating it onto a substrate, such as chitin.

However, that formulation did not have strong oxygen barrier properties because it did not contain the highly crystalline cellulose nanomaterials from our first film. Our team’s most recent achievement, from October 2025, combines the above innovations. As a result, we’ve created a bio-based film that is an excellent barrier to both oxygen and moisture.

Scaling Up Production

When cast into thin films, these components self-organize into a dense structure that resists swelling with water vapor. Tests showed that even at 80% humidity the film matched or outperformed common packaging plastics.

The materials are renewable, biodegradable and compostable. Our team has filed several patent applications, and we are working with industry partners to develop specific packaging uses.

One challenge that applications face is a limited supply of the bio-based components compared to the high volume of conventional plastics. Like any new material, it would take time for manufacturers to develop supply chains as the films begin to be used.

For example, the market demand for purified chitin is small right now, as it is used in niche applications, such as wound dressings and water filtration. Due to its variety of uses, packaging could increase that market demand.

The next challenge is scaling up from experimental films to industrial production, which would likely take several years. The team is exploring roll-to-roll coating techniques and working with industry partners to integrate these materials into existing packaging lines.

Policy and consumer demand will also play a role. As governments push for bans on single-use plastics and companies set sustainability targets, bio-based films could become part of the solution.

The story of this breakthrough reminds me that science often advances through unexpected results. From a failed attempt to mimic a beetle’s color to a promising alternative to plastic, this research shows how curiosity can lead to solutions for some of our biggest challenges.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In these contests, a handler directs a trained dog with whistle signals to guide a small group of sheep across a field and sometimes split the flock cleanly into two groups. But sheep do not always cooperate.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology studied how handler–dog teams manage these unpredictable flocks in sheepdog trials and found principles that extend beyond livestock herding.

In a study published in Science Advances as the cover feature, the researchers applied those insights to computer simulations showing how similar strategies could improve the control of robot swarms, autonomous vehicles, AI agents, and other networked systems where many machines must coordinate their actions despite uncertain conditions.

Group Movement Dynamics

“Birds, bugs, fish, sheep, and many other organisms move in groups because it benefits individuals, including protection from predators,” said Saad Bhamla, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “The puzzle is that the ‘group’ is not a single organism. It is built from many individuals, each making local, imperfect decisions.”

When a predator threatens a herd of sheep, individuals near the edge often move toward the center to reduce their own risk, Bhamla explained. “This is ‘selfish herd’ behavior,” he said. “Shepherds exploit that instinct using trained dogs.”

From examining hours of contest footage, the researchers found that controlling small groups of sheep can be harder than managing large ones. A larger group, with more sheep protected in the center, may behave more coherently than a small group as the animals constantly shift between two instincts: “follow the group” and “flee the dog.”

“That switching behavior makes the group unpredictable,” said Tuhin Chakrabortty, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Bhamla Lab who co-led the study.

Looking closely at how dogs and their handlers guide small groups, the researchers found that unpredictability in the flock’s behavior does not always make control harder. “Under the right conditions, that ‘noisy’ behavior might actually be a benefit,” Bhamla said.

Successful Sheep Herding

Sheepdog handlers categorize sheep by how strongly they respond to a dog’s threatening pressure. Some very responsive sheep might panic under too much pressure, while others might ignore mild pressure and require stronger positioning by the dog.

The researchers observed that successful control often followed a two-step pattern. First, the dog subtly influenced the sheep’s orientation while the animals were mostly standing still. Once the flock was aligned in the desired direction, the dog increased pressure to trigger movement. The timing of those actions was critical, because alignment within a small group could disappear quickly as individuals switched between instincts.

“In our simulations, increasing pressure makes the flock reach the desired orientation faster, but how long the flock stays aligned is set mainly by noise,” Chakrabortty said. “In essence, dogs can steer the direction, but they can’t hold that decision indefinitely, so timing matters.”

But researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have overcome these limitations through the development of an inexpensive, easy-to-assemble, modular, autonomous tracking microscope. 

Costing $400 in parts with DIY assembly instructions available, Trackoscope is a frugal-science innovation accessible to a wide range of users, from high school laboratories to resource-constrained research environments.

Developed in the laboratory of Saad Bhamla, associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE), the Trackoscope is described in a new paper published in the journal PLOS One.

Read the Full Story on the ChBE Website 

But researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have overcome these limitations through the development of an inexpensive, easy-to-assemble, modular, autonomous tracking microscope.

Costing $400 in parts with DIY assembly instructions available, Trackoscope is a frugal-science innovation accessible to a wide range of users, from high school laboratories to resource-constrained research environments.

Read the full story on the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering website.

Prausnitz is the J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) and director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Drug Design, Development and Delivery. He’s also the only Georgia Tech faculty member recognized as both a Regents’ Professor and Regents’ Entrepreneur, the highest academic titles awarded by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents. He joins 105 new NAE members in the 2023 class along with 18 new international members.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Rohan Datta, however, reversed the usual timeline. The 18-year-old recently graduated from The Galloway School in Atlanta. By the time he attends his first classes on campus this fall as a Stamps Scholar, Datta will already have a published paper on his resume.

With guidance from and collaboration with both a professor and an alumna of the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), Datta is the first author on a recently published study in the Journal of Chemical Physics. In the paper, “Conductivity prediction model for ionic liquids using machine learning,” Datta describes his construction of a deep neural network capable of making rapid and accurate predictions of the conductivity of ionic liquids.

Datta’s publication marks a fitting conclusion to high school while serving as the next phase of his Georgia Tech experience.

Read the entire story. 

In addition to the three faculty members, two additional alumni were honored. Nick Lappos (AE ’73), was also elected to the NAE Class of 2022. Lappos is a senior technical fellow (emeritus) of Sikorsky Aircraft Corp and serves on the Georgia Tech Aerospace Engineering School Advisory Council (AESAC). He was honored for “improving rotary wing flight performance and serving as test pilot, engineer, inventor, technologist, and business leader.”

Nathan Meehan (Phys '75), a member of the College of Sciences Advisory Board, was also elected. He is president of CMG Petroleum Consulting Ltd. and was recognized for "technical and business innovation in the application of horizontal well technology for oil and gas production."

They are among this year’s 133 new members (including international selections).

“On behalf of Georgia Tech, I extend my sincere congratulations to Chris, Sandy, and Nick for this incredible honor, which highlights a lifetime of achievement,” said Raheem Beyah, dean of the College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair. “Chris and Nick’s research have advanced their respective fields and left an indelible mark on their peers at Georgia Tech and around the world. Sandy, in addition to her service with NASA, is a tireless advocate of raising awareness of STEM and diversity within the aerospace industry in an effort to grow the next generation of the AE workforce. The College of Engineering is tremendously proud of this trio.”

Jones is the John F. Brock III School Chair in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE). He has been a faculty member at Georgia Tech since 2000, leading a ChBE research group that works in catalysis and adsorption, with a strong emphasis in materials chemistry. The NAE is honoring him for “contributions to the design and synthesis of catalytic materials and for advancing technologies related to carbon capture and sequestration.”

Jones is known in the field for his pioneering work on materials that extract carbon dioxide from ultra-dilute mixtures such as ambient air, which are key components of direct air capture technologies that have the potential to reverse climate change.

Magnus (MSE, 1996) is a professor of the practice with joint appointments in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. She is currently a principal at  AstroPlanetview LLC and is being recognized by the NAE for “national accomplishments in the U.S. civil space program and in Department of Defense engineering and technology integration.

As a NASA astronaut, Magnus flew to space three times and spent 157 days in orbit. Before joining NASA, Magnus worked for McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company as a stealth engineer. After retiring as an astronaut, she served as executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). She is now one of three Georgia Tech women in the NAE, joining Marilyn Brown and Susan Margulies.

Sahinidis is the inaugural Gary C. Butler Family Chair in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a joint appointment in ChBE. In the NAE announcement, Sahinidis was selected for “his contributions to global optimization and the development of widely used software for optimization and machine learning.” His research activities are at the interface between computer science and operations research, with applications in various engineering and scientific areas.

During his career, Sahinidis developed BARON (Branch-and-Reduce Optimization Navigator), a global optimization software system that solves challenging, nonconvex optimization problems, including continuous, integer, and mixed-integer nonlinear problems. Sahinidis also created ALAMO (Automated Learning of Algebraic Models), a black-box modeling tool that generates simple, yet accurate, algebraic models from data. 

The Academy annual inducts new members, recognizing “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature.” The Academy also honors engineers for being instrumental in "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education." 

Georgia Tech now has 45 NAE members. This year's cohort will be formally inducted during the NAE’s annual meeting in October.

“A discovery like this is one of the most exciting parts of our research,” said Sankar Nair, principal investigator and professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. “We're increasingly used to doing research that has a pre-determined application at the end of it, so this is a reminder that fundamental discoveries in materials science are also exciting and important.”

Zeolites have pores roughly the size of many types of molecules, and scientists and engineers have used the varied sizes, shapes, and connections of the pores to discriminate between molecules of different sizes, allowing for the production of chemicals suitable for plastic production, or for the separation of undesired molecules from desired ones, as examples. 

The team was designing syntheses to assemble 2D zeolite materials. In an unexpected turn of events, some of the results indicated that a new type of assembly process was occurring. Indeed, one such case led to a novel 1D zeolite material that had a tube-like structure with perforated porous walls. This 1D material, termed a zeolitic nanotube, was unlike any zeolite ever synthesized or discovered in nature previously.  

“Zeolite nanotubes could be used to make entirely new types of nanoscale components that can control transport of mass or heat or charge, not only down the length of the tube the pipe, but also in and out through the perforated walls,” said Nair.

Resolving the detailed arrangement of the atoms in the zeolite nanotube was a challenging task, for which the Georgia Tech researchers teamed up with zeolite crystallography experts at Stockholm University and Penn State. They found that the nanotube walls had a unique arrangement of atoms that are not known in 3D or 2D zeolites. This same arrangement is also responsible for forcing the zeolite to form as a 1D tube rather than a 2D or 3D material. 

“This is the first example of a new class of nanotubes, and its unique and well-defined structure provides exciting ideas and opportunities to design zeolite nanomaterials,” said Tom Willhammar, co-investigator and researcher at Stockholm University. “Through further work, we hope that different zeolitic nanotubes could be obtained with variations in pore size, shape and chemistry.”

Put plainly – a nanometer-scale tube made from a 1D material with regular, perforated holes on the sides is now available for exploration. In addition to this being a fundamental scientific discovery that could change the way we think about designing porous materials, the researchers see potential for many practical applications.

“The unique structural attributes of these materials will allow for an array of potential applications in membrane separations, catalysis, sensing, and in energy devices where mass or energy transport are crucial,” said Christopher W. Jones, co-principal investigator and professor at Georgia Tech. “The materials may have unique mechanical properties, as well, finding applications in composite materials, as carbon nanotubes have done.  At this stage, the sky is the limit, and we hope researchers will look for creative ways to deploy these materials for the benefit of humanity.”

CITATION: Akshay Korde, Byunghyun Min, Elina Kapaca2, Omar Knio, Iman Nezam, Ziyuan Wang, Johannes Leisen, Xinyang Yin, Xueyi Zhang, David S. Sholl, Xiaodong Zou, Tom Willhammar, Christopher W. Jones, Sankar Nair.  “Single-walled zeolitic nanotubes.” Science. 6 Jan 2022.

DOI: 10.1126/science.abg3793

FUNDING: National Science Foundation (Grant No. CBET-1534179)

The researchers, led by Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, have developed and tested an innovative method that may simplify the complexity of delivering Covid-19 and other vaccines through a handheld electroporator.

While electroporation is commonly employed in the research lab using short electric pulses to drive molecules into cells, the technique currently requires large, complex, and costly equipment, severely limiting its use for vaccine delivery. Georgia Tech’s approach does the job using a novel pen-size device that requires no batteries and can be mass produced at low cost.

The team’s findings are reported in the Oct. 20 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Aha Moment

The inspiration for their breakthrough came from an everyday device that people use to start a grill: the electronic barbecue lighter.

“My lab figured out that you could use something all of us are familiar with on the Fourth of July when we do a barbecue — a barbecue lighter,” recalled Saad Bhamla, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, explaining that every time one clicks the lighter, it generates a brief pulse of electricity to ignite the flame.   

His team took the innards of a lighter and reengineered them into a tiny spring-latch mechanism.  The device creates the same electric field in the skin as the large bulky electroporation machines already in use, but using widely available, low-cost components that require no battery to operate.

“Our aha moment was the fact that it doesn't have a battery or plug into the wall, unlike conventional electroporation equipment,” he explained. “And these lighter components cost just pennies, while currently available electroporators cost thousands of dollars each.”

Pairing the reimagined lighter device with microneedle technology from Georgia Tech’s Laboratory for Drug Delivery has resulted in a new ultra-low-cost electroporation system, or “ePatch.”

Closer Electrode Spacing, Lower Voltages

Besides the lighter, a key innovation involved tightly spacing the electrodes and using extremely short microneedles. While commonly used in cosmetics to rejuvenate skin and for potential medical applications, microneedles are not generally used as electrodes. Coupling the tiny electroporation pulser with microneedle electrodes made an effective electrical interface with the skin and further reduced the ePatch’s cost and complexity.

According to Mark Prausnitz, Regents' Professor and the J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, their microneedle-based system uses voltages similar to conventional electroporation but with pulses that are 10,000 times shorter and using electrodes that penetrate just .01 inch into the skin surface.

“The close spacing of the microneedles allows us to use microsecond pulses rather than the millisecond pulses applied in conventional electroporation. This shorter pulse, plus the shallow location of the microneedle electrodes, minimizes nerve and muscle stimulation, which can avoid pain and twitching, both common side effects of conventional electroporation,” he said.

“Our goal was to design a method for Covid-19 vaccination that uses a device that is simple, low-cost and manufacturable,” said Dengning Xia, lead author on the study while working as a research scientist at Georgia Tech and currently an associate professor at Sun Yat-sen University in China.

“The ePatch is a handheld device the size of a pen, weighing less than two ounces, and requiring no battery or power sources. It operates by simply pushing a button, which makes it very simple to use,” he said.  

Testing for an Immune Response

But could their system be used with a vaccine to generate an immune response?  

To find out, the researchers teamed with Chinglai Yang, associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Emory University School of Medicine, to test the delivery system first using a florescent protein to ensure it worked, and to deliver an actual Covid-19 vaccine. They selected an experimental DNA vaccine for Covid-19 as their model.

“In the beginning, I wasn't sure that it would be successful when Georgia Tech asked me to collaborate on this project,” Yang said. “Surprisingly, even in the first try, it went far beyond my expectations. Using this method with the same amount of vaccine, the ePatch induced an almost tenfold improved immune response over intramuscular immunization or intradermal injection without electroporation. It also showed no lasting effects to the mice’s skin. What this means is that it is easier to achieve protection,” he said.

Simplifying Electroporation

The researchers say the ePatch should also work for mRNA vaccination, which they are currently studying.

But devising a simpler, cost-effective electroporator that works with the DNA vaccine could dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of vaccinations since it doesn’t require deep-freeze storage of mRNA vaccines, which need frigid temperatures because they contain lipid nanoparticles.

“We think the key to making DNA vaccination work is to make electroporation simple, low-cost, and scalable,” Prausnitz said.

The ePatch is generating excitement among health experts, including Nadine Rouphael, professor of medicine and executive director of the Hope Clinic at the Emory Vaccine Center. She notes that today’s genetic vaccines, whether mRNA or DNA, remain expensive as a global solution because they either require a complicated cold chain and costly manufacturing due to the formulation of lipid nanoparticles for mRNA delivery or they need a sophisticated electroporation device for DNA vaccine delivery.

A Vaccine Delivery Breakthrough

“The Georgia Tech portable and affordable electroporation ePatch can overcome these limitations and can be a potential game changer in the vaccine delivery arena,” Rouphael predicted.

The researchers are already looking at ways to refine their system, examining how to optimize the immune response on the skin site and integrating the device into one unit.

“That would revolutionize the vaccination process,” Yang said.

The team must meet multiple milestones before human trials. Prausnitz anticipates it will be more than five years before their invention could complete clinical study and be ready for widespread use. He envisioned the ePatch following a more traditional device approval process than the accelerated vaccine approvals that happened during the pandemic.

All four researchers echo Rouphael’s enthusiasm for the potential of their ePatch to democratize access to vaccinations. Bhamla explained that vaccines work for those who can afford them and have access to healthcare resources, but that is not feasible for large segments of the developing world.

“We know that Covid-19 won’t be the last pandemic,” Bhamla said. “We need to think from a cost as well as design perspective about how to simplify and scale up our hardware so these modern interventions can be more equitably dispersed — to reach more underserved and more under-resourced areas of the world.”

The research team also included Gaurav Byagathvalli, Huan Yu, and Chao-Yi Lu from Georgia Tech and Rui Jin and Ling Ye from Emory University.

Mark Prausnitz is an inventor of patents licensed to companies, is a paid advisor to companies, and is a founder/shareholder of companies developing microneedle-based products. This potential conflict of interest has been disclosed and is managed by Georgia Tech.

CITATION: Dengning Xia, et al., “An ultra-low-cost electroporator with microneedle electrodes (ePatch) for SARS-CoV-2 vaccination” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021). https://www.pnas.org/content/118/45/e2110817118

For the next year, the researchers will deliver daily fire impact forecasts to each school, while also installing air purifiers and low-cost air quality monitors. Data from those monitors will be broadcast in real-time inside and outside classrooms. The Georgia Tech team will also create new curricula for teachers and students that increase understanding of air pollutants, their sources, and mitigation measures. 

The Georgia Tech team consists of members in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE), School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS), and the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain.

“Air pollution leads to more premature deaths than virtually all other environmental exposures. In the Southeast, prescribed burning is a major source of air pollution: it releases more particulate matter into the air than cars, trucks, factories, and power plants,” said Armistead (Ted) Russell, the Howard T. Tellepsen Chair and Regents’ Professor in CEE. “Children in areas that experience prescribed burning smoke are uniquely vulnerable. We are excited to work with schools to identify effective measures that can be used to help protect schoolchildren.”

Russell and his colleagues have decades of experience studying emissions. His previous studies found that prescribed burns led to highly elevated emissions in southern Georgia, especially during the peak burn period from January to April. The research showed that the highest levels of unhealthy emissions — primary and secondary particulate matter — occur during school hours when burns are most active. However, Russell also found that elevated levels linger into the evening, long after the fires are extinguished.

Russell also found a communications gap that helped him create the new initiative.

“Schools are very good at providing information to parents about health-related interventions. Families serve as important communication channels,” Russell said. “However, schools are infrequently used to disseminate information about fire emissions. Incorporating teachers and students into a communications strategy has the potential to reduce exposure to children and the school’s broader community.”

The award will allow Russell and CEE Principal Research Engineer Talat Odman to expand Georgia Tech’s Southern Integrated Prescribed Fire Information System (SIPFIS), which they helped create in 2015. The tool merges prescribed fire and air quality data into a common analysis framework, providing a unified prescribed fire database for the southern U.S. That data is primarily used by forest and air quality managers. SIPFIS will now be tweaked to also provide daily forecasts to the schools.

Forecast and information products and lessons learned from the one-year project will be shared with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its health partners.

The initiative will be coupled with outcomes from a $2.3 million Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program project that is currently being led by Odman. His team is measuring and modeling air quality impacts from prescribed burning at Fort Benning, which is adjacent to Columbus and across the border from Phenix City.

“By focusing on both the source of smoke, such as burns at Ft. Benning, and the effects on nearby schools, we can have a more complete understanding of the air quality impacts of prescribed fires,” said Odman. “This will allow us to develop strategies to minimize exposure to smoke, while also helping to protect the health of people and forests.”

The EPA and DoD projects will further a third project: Russell’s NASA-funded work that is utilizing satellite products in SIPFIS for predicting smoke impacts on air quality and health. 

ChBE and EAS Associate Professor Sally Ng, who researches airborne particles, is also on the Georgia Tech team and will lead the deployment of the low-cost sensors at the schools. Rebecca Watts Hull, a community engagement specialist with the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain, is the fourth member of the team.   

“As wildfires become more frequent and severe, we are working to effectively communicate the risks of smoke exposure to impacted communities,” said Wayne Cascio, acting principal deputy assistant administrator for science in EPA’s Office of Research and Development. “We are seeing an increase in prescribed fires to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires; however, these are also a source of smoke exposure. The research we are funding will help develop strategies to prevent and reduce the health impacts of smoke from wildfires and prescribed fires.”

The project will begin in October.

Led by Associate Professor Nga Lee “Sally” Ng in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, the team evaluated the effect of a hydroxyl radical generator in an office setting. Hydroxyl radicals react with odors and pollutants, decomposing them, and hydroxyl radical generators have been marketed to inactivate pathogens such as coronaviruses.

However, Ng’s study found that in the process of cleaning the air, the hydroxyl radicals generated by the device reacted with volatile organic compounds present in the indoor space. This led to chemical reactions that quickly formed organic acids and secondary organic aerosols that can cause health problems. Secondary organic aerosols is a major component of PM_2.5 (particulate matter with a diameter smaller than 2.5 mm), and exposure to PM_2.5 has been associated with cardiopulmonary diseases and millions of deaths per year.

The paper, “Formation of oxidized gases and secondary organic aerosol from a commercial oxidant-generating electronic air cleaner,” is published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters.

While the pandemic has made various types of electronic cleaners increasingly popular, Ng explained that consumers are probably not aware of the secondary chemistry taking place in the air, with the pollutants generated not being directly emitted by the cleaning device itself.

“There are increasing concerns regarding the use of electronic air cleaners as these devices can potentially generate unintended byproducts via oxidation chemistry similar to that in the atmosphere,” Ng said.

Two types of air cleaning technologies are commonly used to remove indoor pollutants such as particles or volatile organic compounds and to inactivate pathogens: mechanical filtration and electronic air cleaners that generate ions, reactive species, or other chemical products such as photocatalytic oxidation, plasma, and oxidant-generating equipment (e.g., ozone, hydroxyl radical), among others.

Ng’s team selected a hydroxyl generator for the study to measure the oxygenated volatile organic compounds and the chemical composition of particles generated by the device in an office on the Georgia Tech campus.

While previous research reported pollutant formation from various electronic air cleaners (ionizers, plasma systems, photocatalytic systems with ultraviolet lamps, etc.), Ng believes that her team’s study is the first to monitor the chemical composition of secondary pollutants in both gas and particle phases during the operation of an electronic device that dissipates oxidants in a real-world setting.

Advanced instrumentation made Ng’s study possible. Gas-phase organic compounds were measured using a high-resolution time-of-flight chemical ionization mass spectrometer, purchased through a National Science Foundation major instrumentation grant. The study received support from Georgia Tech’s Covid-19 Rapid Response fund.

Ng noted that future studies on air cleaning technology should not be limited to inactivation of viruses or reduction of volatile organic compounds, but should also evaluate potential oxidation chemistry and the formation of unintended harmful gaseous and particulate chemicals.

“More studies need to be conducted on the effects of these devices in a variety of environments,” Ng said. “Electronic air cleaners greatly rose in prominence because of the pandemic, and now there are a lot of these devices out there. Millions of dollars are being spent on these devices by businesses and schools. The market is huge.

“Our results show that care must be taken when choosing an adequate and appropriate air cleaning technology for a particular environment and task,” she said.

Ng stressed the importance of future studies concerning the unintended effects of electronic purifiers, as these devices are not currently well regulated and do not have testing standards.

 “There needs to be more peer-reviewed scientific data on electronic air cleaners,” Ng said. “We hope that additional studies will lead to more government guidelines and regulation.”

CITATION: Joo et al., “Formation of oxidized gases and secondary organic aerosol from a commercial oxidant-generating electronic air cleaner.” (Environmental Science & Technology Letters) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.1c00416

About the Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.

As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Media Relations Contacts: Jason Maderer (jmaderer3@gatech.edu) or Brad Dixon (braddixon@gatech.edu).

Writer: Brad Dixon

The award recognizes early career research excellence in the areas of experimental, computational, and theoretical mechanics and materials by young investigators who are within 10 years after their Ph.D. degree, with special emphasis placed on under-represented groups. The award was established by the ASME Materials Division in 2008 and operated as a division award until 2012 when it was elevated to a Society award.

Hu’s research focuses on the mechanics of soft active materials, an interdisciplinary area between mechanics and polymer chemistry. Her studies span from fundamental mechanics to novel applications, integrating experiments and theory. Hu has published 54 peer-reviewed papers in highly cited journals in both the fields of mechanics and materials. She is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award, the Extreme Mechanics Letters Young Investigator Award and the Journal of Applied Mechanics Award. She has delivered 18 invited seminars in peer institutions, a keynote and eight invited talks in international conferences and workshops. She was elected as the newsletter editor of the ASME technical committee of mechanics of soft materials and is currently serving as the secretary of the committee.  

Hu earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering mechanics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, a Master of Science degree in civil and environmental engineering from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and a Master of Science degree in applied physics and Ph.D. in engineering sciences from Harvard University in the U.S.

“In putting together Undersecretary Dabbar’s visit, we attempted to demonstrate the full range of Georgia Tech’s energy research portfolio, from basic science to industry scale testing, and our deep understanding of national security, national lab partnerships, corporate partnerships, and company startups,” Lieuwen said. “We think the tour achieved this very effectively.” All aspects of Undersecretary Dabbar’s tour were arranged with special considerations for maintaining full compliance with safety and health guidelines.

Topics of discussion included cybersecurity and energy infrastructure, carbon capture and synthetic fuels, and microgrids and electric infrastructure. At each stop along the tour, Dabbar engaged with researchers and experts to discuss their work and to see Georgia Tech’s facilities. He met with about a dozen researchers including Alexa Harter from GTRI’s Cybersecurity, Information Protection, and Hardware Evaluation Research Laboratory; Devesh Ranjan from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering; Krista Walton from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; and Salvador Palafox from NEETRAC.

In his role as undersecretary, Dabbar is the lead for technology commercialization activities for the department and its 17 national labs, as well as the Department of Energy’s principal advisor on fundamental energy research, energy technologies, and science. He also serves on the department’s Environmental Management Advisory Board. Before his appointment as undersecretary in 2017, he was the managing director for mergers and acquisitions at J.P. Morgan, where he focused on operations, finance, and strategy in the energy sector. Dabbar holds a B.S. from the U.S. Naval Academy and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

Created by the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, BioMADE will collaborate with public and private entities to advance sustainable and reliable bioindustrial manufacturing technologies. Headquartered at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, BioMADE includes some of the largest bioindustrial manufacturing employers in the U.S. working in conjunction with some of the top educators in the world.

In support of this collaboration, the $87 million in DoD funding will be combined with more than $187 million in non-federal cost-share from 31 companies, 57 colleges and universities, six nonprofits, and two venture capital groups across 31 states. 

Pamela Peralta-Yahya, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is Tech’s representative to BioMADE’s Leadership Council, which will set the organization’s funding priorities.

Peralta-Yahya says, “An incredible cross section of Georgia Tech faculty contributed to the BioMADE proposal; over 30 faculty members, spanning five Schools across the College of Science, College of Engineering, and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.”

She notes: “Georgia Tech’s involvement in BioMADE is poised to catalyze interdisciplinary collaborations across the university, from data science and downstream processing to supply chain logistics and the policy, legal, and biosafety implications of bioindustrial applications. The projects funded by BioMADE will give undergraduates and graduate students a springboard to the emerging biomanufacturing and related areas.”

Mark Styczynski, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular who is Tech’s representative to the BioMADE Technical Committee, says: “Georgia Tech will be a member of BioMADE at the governing level, the highest level of engagement for academic institutions. We are excited about the resulting opportunities for Georgia Tech to bring to bear its manufacturing, chemical, and biochemical expertise on new applications and focus areas in the biomanufacturing space.”

He adds: “Our involvement in this area is a great complement to other biomanufacturing efforts at Georgia Tech and will contribute to a rapidly growing bioeconomy in Georgia.”

Through a close relationship with DoD and the Military Services, BioMADE will work to establish long-term and dependable bioindustrial manufacturing capabilities for a wide array of products. Anticipated bioindustrial manufacturing applications include the following products: chemicals, solvents, detergents, reagents, plastics, electronic films, fabrics, polymers, agricultural products (e.g. feedstock), crop protection solutions, food additives, fragrances, and flavors.  

BioMADE’s efforts will examine and advance industry-wide standards, tools, and measurements; mature foundational technologies; foster a resilient bioindustrial manufacturing ecosystem; advance education and workforce development; and support the establishment and growth of supply chain intermediaries that are essential for a robust U.S. bioeconomy. Other important focus areas include challenges related to biosafety and security and ethical, legal, and societal considerations.

Stefan France, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry is Tech’s representative to BioMADE’s Education and Workforce Committee, which will help craft and implement the organization’s strategic plan.

France explains that this committee “will concentrate its efforts in three major areas: curriculum and training for the bioindustrial workforce, promoting awareness of career opportunities, and coordination across the STEM community, the biomanufacturing ecosystem, and the training pipeline—everything from K-12 to community and technical colleges to four-year colleges, graduate programs, and post-graduate training.”

Title Talk TBA

WebEx TBA

Conducted by a team led by William Koros, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, the study “Ultraselective glassy polymer membranes with unprecedented performance for energy-efficient sour gas separation” appeared in the May 2019 issue of Science Advances.

Raw natural gas contains many purities, the researchers note, but H₂S and carbon dioxide (CO₂) are arguably the two most important to remove. H₂S can cause eye, nose, and throat irritation in amounts as low as five parts per million (ppm) and instant death when its concentrations exceed 1000 ppm.

Currently an amine absorption-based process dominates most “sour” gas treatment operations, but “it requires huge towers and an enormous amount of energy and expense as well as having environmental concerns,” Koros says.

More than 40 percent of proven raw natural gas reserves in the U.S. are deemed “sour,” requiring treatment to remove excessive CO₂ and H₂S. In parts of the Middle East and Latin America, some reservoirs are presently too difficult to access at all because of high sour gas concentrations, Koros explains.

“Large reserves of natural gas globally remain untapped because of the difficulties involved in processing such low-quality gas,” he adds.

To find solutions, his research team studied a specific type of glassy-ladder polymer of intrinsic microporosity (PIM). PIMs have a highly rigid and contorted backbone structure that doesn’t get compacted so that gas molecules have room to move through the membrane. However, the researchers knew that the conventional PIM wouldn’t be selective enough to filter out H₂S and C_O2.

They found that the key was using a PIM that had been functionalized with amidoxime, which doesn’t hold onto the CO₂ or H₂S as tightly as an amine would, allowing the membrane to both catch and release the impurities.

Koros’ collaborator, Professor Ingo Pinnau at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, had already found the amidoxime-functionalized (AO) PIM worked well for removing CO₂ and believed it might work well for H₂S. So he sent samples to Koros who tested it in his lab at Georgia Tech, finding that the AO-PIM exceeded their expectations.

“We thought it would be good, but not as good as it turned out to be,” Koros says.

His team found that the AO-PIM membrane provided outstanding separation performance of sour gas streams under challenging feed pressures up to 77 bar.

These membranes could ultimately eliminate the need for thermal energy in the sour gas separation process. But big membranes areas would be required for large-scale separations, so future research would be needed to efficiently scale up the process in terms of space requirements, the researchers note.

One challenge they found relates to aging of the membranes. If they are stored for significant periods while not in use, they can lose some productivity due to settling of the glassy structure. But that loss doesn’t happen while the membranes are in active use, and even if aged, productivity can be restored by immersing them in methanol to swell them back to their original state.

“To continue to expand the impact of this technology, higher separation efficiency (selectivity) and higher productivity (permeability) as well as stable performance of membranes under realistic conditions are needed,” the researchers write.

“Given the global quest for clean energy and sustainable development, the synthesis of such novel gas separation membranes with superior performance opens the door to enormous opportunities for natural gas purification, biogas upgrading, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

In addition to Koros and Pinnau, authors of the study include Shouliang Yi, Bader Ghanem, and Yang Liu.

The other institution chosen as an initial Bridge site is the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Chemistry, while ACS has named four other schools as partners.

In September 2018, ACS joined the Inclusive Graduate Education Network (IGEN), a coalition of five scientific societies formed to bolster the number of underrepresented students in the physical sciences. The ACS Bridge Program supports this national effort by assisting chemical science departments in creating a “bridge” for these students to earn their doctorates in chemistry or chemical engineering.

“ACS Bridge Sites and Partnership Departments will help amplify the call for action to diversify the chemical sciences,” says ACS Bridge Program Director Joerg Schlatterer. “Our Society is proud of its stellar cadre of participating institutions.”

Georgia Tech will receive funding from ACS to establish its Bridge Program, which will enroll at least two Bridge fellows annually who will earn a thesis MS in chemical engineering while receiving extensive support, mentoring, and training to prepare for success in a PhD program.

“Georgia Tech is excited to partner with the ACS Bridge Program,” says Carson Meredith, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering who is the Bridge project leader. “We believe we must be intentional to ensure that the next generation of PhDs in the chemical sciences includes representation of the diverse population in the U.S. The Bridge program structure will be adaptable to the individual student’s needs and will involve mentoring by students and other faculty engineered to ensure success.”

In 2016, about 12 percent of 10,000 BS degrees in chemical engineering went to underrepresented minority (URM) students. Only a fraction of these students entered a PhD program in the chemical sciences – far fewer than their representation relative to other groups.

Over the past five years, Georgia Tech’s ChBE PhD Program has enrolled about 10 percent URM students, more than the national average of 7 percent in science and engineering. However, the rate of which URM students leave PhD programs without earning a degree is higher than that of the general population.

"As a public institution located in Atlanta, we are a leader in educating students from underrepresented groups,” says Martha Grover, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering who is the Bridge project co-leader. “However, the best is still not very good. The numbers are too small, and we are committed to doing more. The infrastructure and financial support provided by ACS Bridge will catalyze this new program."

In addition to the two inaugural ACS Bridge Sites, partner institutions include the chemical engineering department at the University of Arkansas as well as the chemistry departments at The Ohio State University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Indiana University. These departments will also enroll students who have submitted their graduate school application to the ACS Bridge Program and will provide a supportive, bridge-like environment for students from underrepresented groups.

Each of these six partnering institutions will work closely with ACS to ensure that the values of diversity, inclusion, and mentoring are being met. The American Chemical Society Bridge Project is supported by NSF-1834545. To learn more about the ACS Bridge Program, visit the website or email bridge@acs.org.

The American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, is a not-for-profit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. ACS does not conduct research, but publishes and publicizes peer-reviewed scientific studies. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

As she was finishing her Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she found her interest wandering to other disciplines. She took a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in a medical school studying neurogenetics.

“It was partially serendipitous. I didn’t know this was the thing I would do,” she said, referring to her research work. But those two years gave her a chance to test things, explore, and — as she puts it — play.

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And, though nervous about the challenges Tech might pose faced, Whisnant hit a stride during the first semester here, finishing with honors. Whisnant earned a bachelor's degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering this weekend.

In addition to chemical engineering, Whisnant found the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking along the way. There, Whisnant helped set up exhibits and host guests at the museum affiliated with Tech’s Renewable Bioproducts Institute.

Whisnant also found a creative outlet through Tech’s chorale choir.

“The technical part of people and the artistic part of people — it’s very important to nurture both of them,” Whisnant said. “It’s a relief to spend time with other people and make music.”

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Julie Dshemuchadse

The award provides $120,000 over two years to the principal investigator (Ng) to appoint a postdoctoral fellow.

Ng’s research interest is in aerosol chemistry, air quality, and health effects. Her research focuses on both laboratory experiments and field measurements to understand the formation and evolution of atmospheric nanoparticles (aerosols). 

She won a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2015.

The purpose of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc., is to advance the science of chemistry, chemical engineering and related sciences as a means of improving human relations and circumstances throughout the world. Established in 1946 by chemist, inventor and businessman Camille Dreyfus as a memorial to his brother Henry, the Foundation became a memorial to both men when Camille Dreyfus died in 1956. Throughout its history the Foundation has sought to take the lead in identifying and addressing needs and opportunities in the chemical sciences.

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John Blazeck

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Qi Zhang

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Dr. Trung Nguyen, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern University

“Predictive Design of Bio-inspired Nanomaterials: Nanoscale Modeling Meets High-performance Computing”

ABSTRACT

Nanomaterials and devices that resemble biological matter in their ability to reconfigure and adapt on demand have captured increasingly growing interest in a wide range of applications including, but not limited to, biological catalysis, drug delivery, bio-sensing and energy storage and conversion. Bottom-up approaches such as self- and directed-assembly are among the most promising techniques for engineering the underlying nanostructure of this exciting class of materials and devices. The fundamental challenges to these techniques are 1) to design assembling nano building blocks such as block copolymers, nanoparticles and colloids, 2) to tailor their effective interactions and 3) to find efficient assembly pathways. In this talk, I will demonstrate how computational studies supported by high performance computing have helped address these challenges. Specifically, I will discuss the design rules for several hierarchically assembled structures including terminal supraparticles, helical ribbons and columnar morphologies. I will describe unconventional approaches for assembling bio-mimicking and reconfigurable nanostructures such as interaction switching and shape shifting. Also presented are the tools and methods I have been developing to improve the efficiency of the computational studies of interest, ranging from GPU acceleration to enhanced sampling methods.

BIO

Dr. Trung D. Nguyen obtained his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2011 under Sharon C. Glotzer. His doctoral thesis is entitled "Computer-aided design of nanostructures from self- and directed-assembly of soft matter building blocks". During 2011-2014, he served as a postdoctoral research associate at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he investigated interfacial effects and phase transitions in confined systems using large-scale simulations and developed massively parallel Molecular Dynamics codes for the Titan supercomputer. In 2014-2016, he worked at the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology as an independent investigator. Since 2016, he has joined Monica Olvera de la Cruz's group at Northwestern University as a research associate. His research focuses on addressing exciting problems in soft matter physics with high-performance computing. His work has been recognized by the Vietnam Education Foundation Fellow Association Science Award 2012 and the MRS Communications Lecture Award 2015.

While the specific mechanism by which the nanotextured material kills bacteria requires further study, the researchers believe tiny spikes and other nano-protrusions created on the surface puncture bacterial membranes to kill the bugs. The surface structures don’t appear to have a similar effect on mammalian cells, which are an order of magnitude larger than the bacteria.

Beyond the anti-bacterial effects, the nano-texturing also appears to improve corrosion resistance. The research was reported December 12 in the journal ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

“This surface treatment has potentially broad-ranging implications because stainless steel is so widely used and so many of the applications could benefit,” said Julie Champion, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “A lot of the antimicrobial approaches currently being used add some sort of surface film, which can wear off. Because we are actually modifying the steel itself, that should be a permanent change to the material.”

Champion and her Georgia Tech collaborators found that the surface modification killed both Gram negative and Gram positive bacteria, testing it on Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. But the modification did not appear to be toxic to mouse cells – an important issue because cells must adhere to medical implants as part of their incorporation into the body.

The research began with a goal of creating a super-hydrophobic surface on the stainless steel in an effort to repel liquids – and with them, bacteria. But it soon became clear that creating such a surface would require the use of a chemical coating, which the researchers didn’t want to do. Postdoctoral Fellows Yeongseon Jang and Won Tae Choi then proposed an alternative idea of using a nanotextured surface on stainless steel to control bacterial adhesion, and they initiated a collaboration to demonstrate this effect.

The research team experimented with varying levels of voltage and current flow in a standard electrochemical process. Typically, electrochemical processes are used to polish stainless steel, but Champion and collaborator Dennis Hess – a professor and Thomas C. DeLoach, Jr. Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering – used the technique to roughen the surface at the nanometer scale.

“Under the right conditions, you can create a nanotexture on the grain surface structure,” Hess explained. “This texturing process increases the surface segregation of chromium and molybdenum and thus enhances corrosion resistance, which is what differentiates stainless steel from conventional steel.”

Microscopic examination showed protrusions 20 to 25 nanometers above the surface. “It’s like a mountain range with both sharp peaks and valleys,” said Champion. “We think the bacteria-killing effect is related to the size scale of these features, allowing them to interact with the membranes of the bacterial cells.”

The researchers were surprised that the treated surface killed bacteria. And because the process appears to rely on a biophysical rather than chemical process, the bugs shouldn’t be able to develop resistance to it, she added.

A second major potential application for the surface modification technique is food processing equipment. There, the surface treatment should prevent bacteria from adhering, enhancing existing sterilization techniques. 

The researchers used samples of a common stainless alloy known as 316L, treating the surface with an electrochemical process in which current was applied to the metal surfaces while they were submerged in a nitric acid etching solution.

Application of the current moves electrons from the metal surface into the electrolyte, altering the surface texture and concentrating the chromium and molybdenum content. The specific voltages and current densities control the type of surface features produced and their size scale, said Hess, who worked with Choi – then a Ph.D. student – and Associate Professor Victor Breedveld in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Professor Preet Singh in the School of Materials Science and Engineering, to design the nanotexturing process.

To more fully assess the antibacterial effects, Jang engaged the expertise of Andrés García, a Regents’ Professor in Georgia Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and Graduate Student Christopher Johnson. In their experiments, they allowed bacterial samples to grow on treated and untreated stainless steel samples for periods of up to 48 hours.

At the end of that time, the treated metal had significantly fewer bacteria on it. That observation was confirmed by removing the bacteria into a solution, then placing the solution onto agar plates. The plates receiving solution from the untreated stainless steel showed much larger bacterial growth. Additional testing confirmed that many of the bacteria on the treated surfaces were dead.

Mouse fibroblast cells, however, did not seem to be bothered by the surface. “The mammalian cells seemed to be quite healthy,” said Champion. “Their ability to proliferate and cover the entire surface of the sample suggested they were fine with the surface modification.”

For the future, the researchers plan to conduct long-term studies to make sure the mammalian cells remain healthy. The researchers also want to determine how well their nanotexturing holds up when subjected to wear. 

“In principle, this is very scalable,” said Hess. “Electrochemistry is routinely applied commercially to process materials at a large scale.”

CITATION: Yeongseon Jang, et al., “Inhibition of Bacterial Adhesion on Nano-Textured Stainless Steel 316L by Electrochemical Etching,” (ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, 2017). http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.7b00544

The replicability of results from scientific studies has become a major source of concern in the research community, particularly in the social sciences and biomedical sciences. But many researchers in the fields of engineering and the hard sciences haven’t felt the same level of concern for independent validation of their results.

A new study that compared the results reported in thousands of papers published about the properties of metal organic framework (MOF) materials – which are prominent candidates for carbon dioxide adsorption and other separations – suggests the replicability problem should be a concern for materials researchers, too. 

One in five studies of MOF materials examined by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology were judged to be “outliers,” with results far beyond the error bars normally used to evaluate study results. The thousands of research papers yielded just nine MOF compounds for which four or more independent studies allowed appropriate comparison of results.

“At a fundamental level, I think people in materials chemistry feel that things are reproducible and that they can count on the results of a single study,” said David Sholl, a professor and John F. Brock III School Chair in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “But what we found is that if you pull out any experiment at random, there’s a one in five chance that the results are completely wrong – not just slightly off, but not even close.”

Whether the results can be more broadly applied to other areas of materials science awaits additional studies, Sholl said. The results of the study, which was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, were published November 28 in the ACS journal Chemistry of Materials.

Sholl chose MOFs because they’re an area of interest to his lab – he develops models for the materials – and because the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) had already assembled a database summarizing the properties of MOFs. Co-authors Jongwoo Park and Joshua Howe used meta-analysis techniques to compare the results of single-component adsorption isotherm testing – how much CO2 can be removed at room temperature. 

That measurement is straightforward and there are commercial instruments available for doing the tests. “People in the community would consider this to be an almost foolproof experiment,” said Sholl, who is also a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Energy Sustainability.

The researchers considered the results definitive when they had four or more studies of a given MOF at comparable conditions. 

The implications for errors in materials science may be less than in other research fields. But companies could use the results of a just one or two studies to choose a material that appear to be more efficient, and in other cases, researchers unable to replicate an experiment may simply move on to another material.

“The net result is non-optimal use of resources at the very least,” Sholl said. “And any report using one experiment to conclude a material is 15 or 20 percent better than another material should be viewed with great skepticism, as we cannot be very precise on these measurements in most cases.”

Why the variability in results? Some MOFs can be finicky, quickly absorbing moisture that affect adsorption, for instance. The one-in-five “outliers” may be a result of materials contamination.

“One of the materials we studied is relatively simple to make, but it’s unstable in an ambient atmosphere,” Sholl explained. “Exactly what you do between making it in the lab and testing it will affect the properties you measure. That could account for some of what we saw, and if a material is that sensitive, we know it’s going to be a problem in practical use.”

Other factors that may prevent replication include details that were inadvertently left out of a methods description – or that the original scientists didn’t realize were relevant. That could be as simple as the precise atmosphere in which the material is maintained, or the materials used in the apparatus producing the MOFs.

Sholl hopes the paper will lead to more replication of experiments so scientists and engineers can know if their results really are significant.

“As a result of this, I think my group will look at all reported data in a more nuanced way, not necessarily suspecting it is wrong, but thinking about how reliable that data might be,” he said. “Instead of thinking about data as a number, we need to always think about it as a number plus a range.”

Sholl suggests that more reporting of second, third or fourth efforts to replicate an experiment would help raise the confidence of data on MOF materials properties. The scientific publishing system doesn’t currently provide much incentive for reporting validation, though Sholl hopes that will change.

He also feels the issue needs to be discussed within all parts of the scientific community, though he admits that can lead to “uncomfortable” conversations.

“We have presented this study a few times at conferences, and people can get pretty defensive about it,” Sholl said. “Everybody in the field knows everybody else, so it’s always easier to just not bring up this issue.”

And, of course, Sholl would like to see others replicate the work he and his research team did. “It will be interesting to see if this one-in-five number holds up for other types of experiments and materials,” he added. “There are other certainly other areas of materials chemistry where this kind of comparison could be done.”

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through grant DE-FE0026433 and by the Center for Understanding and Control of Acid Gas-Induced Evolution of Materials for Energy (UNCAGE-ME), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences under Award #DE-SC0012577. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of sponsors.

The 2017 list, which includes 3,400 Highly Cited Researchers in 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences, focuses on contemporary research achievement. Only Highly Cited Papers in science and social sciences journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection during the 11-year period 2005-2015 were surveyed. Highly Cited Papers are defined as those that rank in the top 1 percent by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science.

Ng, an associate professor, studies aerosol chemistry, air quality, and health effects. Her research focuses on both laboratory experiments and field measurements to understand the formation and evolution of atmospheric nanoparticles (aerosols).

Xia, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry (who holds a joint appointment in ChBE), holds the Brock Family Chair and is a GRA Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine. He studies nanocrystal synthesis, nanomedicine, structure-property relationship of shape-controlled nanocrystals, and catalysis.

In 2010, Jones co-authored the paper “Application of Amine-Tethered Solid Sorbents for Direct CO₂ Capture from Ambient Air” in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Since that time, this study has amassed nearly 200 citations in other journal articles.

Jones is at the forefront of a field involving direct air capture (DAC) of CO₂. The technology involves air-capture machines that can be installed anywhere to soak up the carbon dioxide emissions from not only power plants, but also such sources such as automobiles, airplanes, ships, homes, and farms.

In the 2010 study, Jones and his collaborators showed that amine-based air capture processes have the potential to be an effective approach to extracting CO₂ from the ambient air. They noted that direct CO₂ capture from ambient air offers the potential to be a truly carbon negative technology instead of just slowing the impact of CO₂ buildup on climate change.

Q&A

• How has the direct air capture of CO₂ evolved since that publication of this paper?

Since this first paper, which describes work we initially disclosed at the Fall 2009 AIChE Annual Meeting, the field of DAC using solid adsorbent materials has grown tremendously. Two main chemical approaches to DAC include adsorption using solid materials that selectively bind CO₂, or liquid solutions that similarly react with CO₂ in preference over the other components in air.

• Is this technology actively in use?

Yes! It is very exciting that Swiss researchers and business leaders at Climeworks have developed the first commercial DAC plant. Other companies have developed competing technologies, including Carbon Engineering in Canada, and Global Thermostat, here in the United States. The Global Thermostat technology, which is based in part on our research at Georgia Tech, offers many significant advantages over other approaches.  We continue to work closely with Global Thermostat, as they have built their initial R&D laboratory in Atlanta to be close to Georgia Tech.

• How much capacity could it have to slow climate change?

If widely deployed, it could not only slow climate change, but in principle, actively reverse some aspects of climate change. Currently, a National Academies panel is evaluating the array of options available for reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, including DAC, and will report on the potential of the various approaches in 2018.

• Why do you think this paper has been cited so frequently?

There are a few key reasons. It is one of the earliest papers describing the use of amine adsorbents for DAC, while discussing the potential impact on climate change.  It addresses a topic, limiting or reversing climate change, that is widely recognized as one of grand challenges of our time. And it appears in a widely read and respected American Chemical Society journal.

• Do you continue to research this technology? What is some related research you’ve published?

Yes, we continue to work on materials and processes for DAC. For example, we are investigating improved materials for CO2 extraction from air (W Chaikittisilp, R Khunsupat, TT Chen, CW Jones, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2011, 50 (24), 14203-14210) and  we seek to understand the molecular basis for efficient adsorbent-CO2 binding (SA Didas, MA Sakwa-Novak, GS Foo, C Sievers, CW Jones, The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 2014, 5 (23), 4194-4200; MA Alkhabbaz, P Bollini, GS Foo, C Sievers, CW Jones, Journal of the American Chemical Society 2014, 136 (38), 13170-13173), 

We have published a retrospective account of our development of DAC materials and processes (SA Didas, S Choi, W Chaikittisilp, CW Jones, Accounts of Chemical Research 2015, 48 (10), 2680-2687), as well as detailed review of the current state of DAC (ES Sanz-Pérez, CR Murdock, SA Didas, CW Jones, Chemical Reviews 2016, 116 (19), 11840-11876). 

I’m most excited that many of my colleagues at Georgia Tech are now working on DAC, with Professors Ryan Lively, David Sholl, Krista Walton, and Matthew Realff working on materials and processes related to this technology, both in collaboration with me and independently.

Georgia Tech is a wonderful place to work on technological grand challenges, and the UNCAGE ME EFRC, sponsored by the Department of Energy, has provided the resources for us to work together on such problems.

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Robert Hazen, Carnegie Center

“Chance, Necessity, and the Origins of Life”

Abstract:

Earth’s 4.5 billion year history is a complex tale of deterministic physical and chemical processes, as well as "frozen accidents." This history is preserved most vividly in mineral species, as explored in new approaches called "mineral evolution" and "mineral ecology."

This lecture will explore possible roles of mineral surfaces in life’s origins, including molecular synthesis, protection, selection, concentration, and templating. We find that Earth's changing near-surface mineralogy reflects the co-evolving geosphere and biosphere in a variety of surprising ways that touch on life's origins. Recent research adds two important insights to this discussion. First, chance versus necessity is an inherently false dichotomy when considering the possibility of life on other worlds—a range of probabilities exists for many natural events. Second, given the astonishing combinatorial chemical richness of early Earth, chemical events that are extremely rare may, nevertheless, be deterministic on time scales of a billion years.

Bio

Robert M. Hazen, Senior Staff Scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Sciences at George Mason University, received the B.S. and S.M. in geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Ph.D. at Harvard University in earth science. He is author of 400 scientific articles and 25 books, including Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origin (National Academy Press, 2005) and The Story of Earth (Viking-Penguin, 2012). A former President of the Mineralogical Society of America and winner of awards for research, science communications, and teaching, Hazen’s recent research focuses on the varied roles of minerals in the origin of life, the co-evolution of the geo- and biospheres, the development of complex systems, and the application of “big data” to understanding mineral diversity and distribution. He is active in national science education policy; with coauthor James Trefil he contributed to the National Science Education Standards and wrote the best-selling Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy (Doubleday, 1991) and The Sciences: An Integrated Approach (Wiley, 1995). He is also Executive Director and Principal Investigator of the Deep Carbon Observatory, a 10-year project to study the chemical and biological roles of carbon in Earth’s interior, sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Carnegie Institution. Hazen is active in presenting science to nonscientists through writing, radio, TV, public lectures, and video courses. In 2016 Hazen retired after a 40-year career as a professional symphonic trumpeter.

Krishna Jayachandrababu is winner of the Ziegler Award for Best Publication for “Structural and Mechanical Differences in Mixed-Linker Zeolitic Imidazolate Framework Synthesis by Solvent Assisted Exchange and de Novo Routes” (with his advisors Drs. David Sholl and Sankar Nair), Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Alexandra Tsoras is winner of the Ziegler Award for Best PhD Proposal for “Peptide Nanoclusters for Increased Immunogenicity in Vaccines.” She is advised by Dr. Julie Champion.

The Waldemar T. Ziegler Awards were established by the family and friends of the late Waldemar T. Ziegler to honor his lifelong commitment to academic excellence and research.

Ziegler was on the faculty of the School of Chemical Engineering from 1946 until his retirement in 1978, when he was named Regents’ Professor emeritus. He died in 1996, leaving behind a legacy of outstanding research in the fields of cryogenics and thermodynamics. Ziegler was instrumental in establishing both the School’s and Georgia Tech’s reputations for outstanding research.

Two individual Ziegler Awards are presented annually to graduate students. The Ziegler Award for Best Paper began in 1998, and the Ziegler Award for Best Proposal began in 2005.

In the video submission, Kolluru performs an Indian classical dance to demonstrate her work to help create an effective, safe microneedle patch for polio vaccination.

The “Dance Your Ph.D.” competition is hosted annually by Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

“I have always loved to dance,” said Kolluru, who learned Kuchipudi dance as a child in southern India. “Now I’m learning it again with my daughter, who is also in the video. The competition is a perfect opportunity for me to combine two things that I am passionate about: my research and dance.”

Polio is a highly contagious disease that can cause lifelong disability. It primarily affects children and is still endemic to three countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

“As part of the polio elimination strategy, my Ph.D. thesis involves optimization of formulations to develop a polio vaccine microneedle patch that is safe and stable. We are creating something that doesn’t need to be refrigerated, dissolves quickly upon administration and doesn’t leave behind dangerous, sharp needles.”

The six-and-a-half-minute dance is based on a simple concept: no children should be dancing only in their dreams. It begins with two kids happily playing and dancing, only to be later attacked and paralyzed by polio. The remainder of the performance explains the research and concludes with vaccinated children fighting off the disease.

“I dream of a polio-free world,” Kolluru said.

Kolluru is in Mark Prausnitz’s lab in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. The group garnered headlines around the world earlier this year after a phase I clinical trial, conducted by Emory University and Georgia Tech, tested a flu vaccination using Band-Aid-like microneedle patches. 

The public can vote until 11:59 p.m. on Monday, October 30. A panel of scientists will judge the entries on their artistic and scientific merits. The overall winner will screen their dance at the annual AAAS meeting in Austin, Texas, in February 2018.

Jones won the 2016 Andreas Acrivos Award, which recognizes outstanding progress in the field of chemical engineering by one researcher in any area of chemical engineering research who is less than 45 years of age at the end of the calendar year in which the award is presented. One of the AIChE’s most prestigious awards, the awardee must have made a significant contribution to the science of chemical engineering, such as development of a new process or product in the chemical engineering field or distinguished service rendered to the profession of chemical engineering.

Jone’s lecture at the 2017 meeting (from 11:15am-12:15 p.m. in Minneapolis Convention Center Ballroom B) is titled “Engineering Amine-Modified Silicates for CO₂ Separations and Catalysis.”

Abstract:

Worldwide energy demand is projected to grow strongly in the coming decades, with most of the growth in developing countries. Even with unprecedented growth rates in the development of renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind and bioenergy, the world will continue to rely on fossil fuels as a predominant energy source for at least the next several decades. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that anthropogenic CO₂ has contributed measurably to climate change over the course of the last century. To this end, there is growing interest in new technologies that might allow continued use of fossil fuels without drastically increasing atmospheric CO₂ concentrations beyond currently projected levels.

In this lecture, I will describe the design and synthesis, characterization and application of new aminosilica materials that we have developed as cornerstones of new technologies for the removal of CO₂ from dilute gas streams. These chemisorbents efficiently remove CO₂ from simulated flue gas streams, and the CO₂ capacities are actually enhanced by the presence of water, unlike in the case of physisorbents such as zeolites. Interestingly, the heat of adsorption for these sorbents is sufficiently high that the sorbents are also capable of capturing CO₂ from extremely dilute gas streams, such as the ambient air. Indeed, our oxide-supported amine adsorbents are quite efficient at the direct “air capture” of CO₂ and we will describe our investigations into development of new “air capture” technologies as well.

Finally, the amine-modified silica materials are known to be efficient catalysts in coupling reactions important in organic synthesis, such as aldol and nitroaldol condensations. Inspired by biological catalysts that make and break bonds using cooperative organocatalytic sites, chemocatalysts designed to promote cooperativity between amines and weakly acidic sites are shown to be highly effective catalysts. Catalyst design elements that strongly impact kinetic cooperativity will be presented.

Drivers, builders, designers, engineers, executives, and even academics with ties to Georgia Tech made their mark on the worlds of stock car and drag racing.

Read the Full Story:

Georgia Tech's Racing Roots, Part 2: The Need for Speed

Georgia Tech was tied for 4^th overall for its undergraduate engineering program, with all of its engineering specialties ranked in the Top 6.

“This is indeed a reflection of the strong and sustained efforts demonstrated by our engineering chairs, faculty, staff and students,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, incoming dean of engineering at Georgia Tech. ”We continue to strive to provide the best engineering education possible, and create an environment where today’s students are developed as tomorrow’s thinkers, leaders, and creators. While rankings do not tell the whole story regarding a campus or program, they do demonstrate the commitment that each of the individual Schools have toward our students and to excellence in education and research.”

Program scores are based on surveys of deans and faculty members at other universities. The U.S. News rankings can carry heavy influence among current undergraduates, professors, prospective students, peer institutions, and the media.   

Engineering Programs 

#1 Industrial/Manufacturing 

#1 Biomedical 

#2 Aerospace 

#2 Civil 

#2 Environmental (up from #4 and tied with Stanford and Michigan)

#3 Mechanical 

#3 Chemical (up from #4)

#4 Electrical 

#5 Materials (up from #6)

#6  Computer Engineering

• Tuesday, September 14, 2017,11:00 a.m., ES&T L1125
• Thursday, October 12, 2017, 11:00 a.m., ES&T L1125
• Thursday, November 30, 2017, 11:00 a.m., ES&T L1125

See linked form to register for an information session.

• Tuesday, September 14, 2017,11:00 a.m., ES&T L1125
• Thursday, October 12, 2017, 11:00 a.m., ES&T L1125
• Thursday, November 30, 2017, 11:00 a.m., ES&T L1125

See linked form to register for an information session.

• Tuesday, September 14, 2017,11:00 a.m., ES&T L1125
• Thursday, October 12, 2017, 11:00 a.m., ES&T L1125
• Thursday, November 30, 2017, 11:00 a.m., ES&T L1125

See linked form to register for an information session.

Reichmanis, who holds the Pete Silas Chair in Engineering at Georgia Tech, will receive the award at the society's 255th ACS National Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 20, 2018.

The award winners were announced in the August 21 issue of Chemical & Engineering News.

With nearly 157,000 members, the American Chemical Society (ACS) is the world’s largest scientific society and one of the world’s leading sources of authoritative scientific information. A nonprofit organization, chartered by Congress, ACS is at the forefront of the evolving worldwide chemistry enterprise and the premier professional home for chemists, chemical engineers and related professions around the globe.

Dear Faculty, Staff and Students:

What makes each of us unique goes far beyond an acknowledgement — we should strive every day to appreciate it and value it. I think this is a good note on which to start a new semester (and for some of us, a first semester!).

Diversity is a hallmark of our College. The differences in our students, staff and faculty transcend what can be seen on the surface. We are a community of people with widely varying influences, perspectives and values. As we embrace those differences in each other, our view of the world opens to even more possibilities.

And what could be more important to a College of Engineering? Our lifeblood is the pursuit of new knowledge, new technologies and new solutions to improve the human condition. Appreciation and acceptance of our differences makes our pursuit even more productive and rewarding. We never know where the next great invention or idea will come from. But we do know it’s most likely to emerge when people of different backgrounds and experiences work together.

As I begin the journey as your new dean, I look forward to meeting and learning more about you in the months ahead. For now, I wish each of you great success in the fall semester!

Steven W. McLaughlin

Incoming Dean of the College of Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

Lu’s project, “Live imaging of the C. elegans connectome,” with Oliver Hobert of Columbia University, entails the development and dissemination of tools that empower the C.elegans neuroscience community to study the connectome of this nematode, which was the first multicellular organism to have its whole genome sequenced.

NSF’s NeuroNex awards bring together researchers across disciplines with new technologies and approaches, with the aim of yielding novel ways to tackle the mysteries of the brain.

“Through the development of advanced instrumentation to observe and model the brain, we're closer to our goal of building a more complete knowledge base about how neural activity produces behavior,” said Jim Olds, NSF assistant director for Biological Sciences.

“NeuroNex seeks to take that progress forward, by creating an ecosystem of new tools, resources, and theories,” Olds added. “Most importantly, NeuroNex aims to ensure their broad dissemination to the neuroscience community. With these awards, NSF is building a foundation for the next generation of research into the brain.”

Lu and Hobert, whose project is one of 17 to receive a NeuroNex award, have been awarded $739,277 for three years, starting September 1.

NeuroNex is part of NSF’s Understanding the Brain program, which is the avenue through which the foundation participates in the national Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, an ambitious alliance formed by the Obama Administration, bringing together federal agencies and other partners to enhance our understanding of the brain.

In a comment article published April 26 in the journal Nature, two researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology suggest seven energy-intensive separation processes they believe should be the top targets for research into low-energy purification technologies. Beyond cutting energy use, improved techniques for separating chemicals from mixtures would also reduce pollution, cut carbon dioxide emissions – and open up new ways to obtain critical resources the world needs.

Technologies applicable to those separation processes are at varying stages of development, the authors note. These alternative processes are now under-developed or expensive to scale up, and making them feasible for large-scale use could require a significant investment in research and development.

“We wanted to highlight how much of the world’s energy is used for chemical separations and point to some areas where large advances could potentially be made by expanding research in these areas,” said David Sholl, one of the article’s authors and chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. “These processes are largely invisible to most people, but there are large potential rewards – to both energy and the environment – for developing improved separation processes in these areas.”

In the United States, substituting non-thermal approaches for purifying chemicals could reduce energy costs by $4 billion per year in the petroleum, chemical and paper manufacturing sectors alone. There’s also a potential for reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 100 million tons per year.

“Chemical separations account for about half of all U.S. industrial energy use,” noted Ryan Lively, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and the article’s second author. “Developing alternatives that don’t use heat could dramatically improve the efficiency of 80 percent of the separation processes that we now use.”

Dubbed the “seven chemical separations to change the world,” the list is not intended to be exhaustive, but includes:

• Hydrocarbons from crude oil. Hydrocarbons from crude oil are the main ingredients for making fuels, plastics and polymers – keys to the world’s consumer economy. Each day, the article notes, refineries around the world process around 90 million barrels of crude oil, mostly using atmospheric distillation processes that consume about 230 gigawatts of energy per year, the equivalent of the total 2014 energy consumption of the United Kingdom. Distillation involves heating the oil and then capturing different compounds as they evaporate at different boiling points. Finding alternatives is difficult because oil is complex chemically and must be maintained at high temperatures to keep the thick crude flowing.
• Uranium from sea water. Nuclear power could provide additional electricity without boosting carbon emissions, but the world’s uranium fuel reserves are limited. However, more than four billion tons of the element exist in ocean water. Separating uranium from ocean water is complicated by the presence of metals such as vanadium and cobalt that are captured along with uranium in existing technologies. Processes to obtain uranium from sea water have been demonstrated on small scales, but those would have to be scaled up before they can make a substantial contribution to the expansion of nuclear power.
• Alkenes from alkanes. Production of certain plastics requires alkenes – hydrocarbons such as ethane and propene, whose total annual production exceeds 200 million tons. The separation of ethene from ethane, for instance, typically requires high-pressure cryogenic distillation at low temperatures. Hybrid separation techniques that use a combination of membranes and distillation could reduce energy use by a factor of two or three, but large volumes of membrane materials – up to one million square meters at a single chemical plant – could be required for scale-up.
• Greenhouse gases from dilute emissions. Emission of carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons such as methane contribute to global climate change. Removing these compounds from dilute sources such as power plant emissions can be done using liquid amine materials, but removing the carbon dioxide from that material requires heat. Less costly methods for removing carbon dioxide are needed.
• Rare earth metals from ores. Rare earth elements are used in magnets, catalysts and high-efficiency lighting. Though these materials are not really rare, obtaining them is difficult because they exist in trace quantities that must be separated from ores using complex mechanical and chemical processes.
• Benzene derivatives from each other. Benzene and its derivatives are essential to production of many polymers, plastics, fibers, solvents and fuel additives. These molecules are now separated using distillation columns with combined annual energy usage of about 50 gigawatts. Advances in membranes or sorbents could significantly reduce this energy investment.
• Trace contaminants from water. Desalination is already critical to meeting the need for fresh water in some parts of the world, but the process is both energy and capital intensive, regardless of whether membrane or distillation processes are used. Development of membranes that are both more productive and resistant to fouling could drive down the costs.

Sholl and Lively conclude the paper by suggesting four steps that could be taken by academic researchers and policymakers to help expand the use of non-thermal separation techniques:

1. In research, consider realistic chemical mixtures and reflect real-world conditions, 
2. Evaluate the economics and sustainability of any separation technique, 
3. Consider the scale at which technology would have to be deployed for industry, and 
4. Further expose chemical engineers and chemists in training to separation techniques that do not require distillation.

CITATION: David S. Sholl and Ryan P. Lively, “Seven chemical separations to change the world,” (Nature, Vol. 532, 2016). http://www.nature.com/news/seven-chemical-separations-to-change-the-world-1.19799

A phase I clinical trial conducted by Emory University in collaboration with researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology has found that influenza vaccination using Band-Aid-like patches with dissolvable microneedles was safe and well-tolerated by study participants, was just as effective in generating immunity against influenza, and was strongly preferred by study participants over vaccination with a hypodermic needle and syringe. The microneedle patch vaccine could also save money because it is easily self-administered, could be transported and stored without refrigeration, and is easily disposed of after use without sharps waste. 

Results of the study are published June 27, 2017 in the medical journal The Lancet. The research was supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health. 

“Despite the recommendation of universal flu vaccination, influenza continues to be a major cause of illness leading to significant morbidity and mortality,” said first author Nadine Rouphael, M.D., associate professor of medicine (infectious diseases) at Emory University School of Medicine and principal investigator of the clinical trial. “Having the option of a flu vaccine that can be easily and painlessly self-administered could increase coverage and protection by this important vaccine.” 

The first-in-human clinical trial of the flu vaccine patches began in June 2015 with 100 participants aged 18-49 who were healthy and who had not received the influenza vaccine during the 2014-15 flu season. The study was conducted at the Hope Clinic of the Emory Vaccine Center in Atlanta. The study was carried out under an Investigational New Drug Application authorized by the FDA.

Participants were randomized into four groups: (1) vaccination with microneedle patch given by a health care provider; (2) vaccination with microneedle patch self-administered by study participants; (3) vaccination with intramuscular injection given by a health care provider; and (4) placebo microneedle patch given by a health care provider.

“People have a lot of reasons for not getting flu vaccinations,” said senior co-author Mark Prausnitz, Ph.D., Georgia Tech Regents professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. “One of the main goals of developing the microneedle patch technology was to make vaccines accessible to more people. Traditionally, if you get an influenza vaccine you need to visit a health care professional who will administer the vaccine using a hypodermic needle. The vaccine is stored in the refrigerator, and the used needle must be disposed of in a safe manner. With the microneedle patch, you could pick it up at the store and take it home, put it on your skin for a few minutes, peel it off and dispose of it safely, because the microneedles have dissolved away. The patches can also be stored outside the refrigerator, so you could even mail them to people.”

Study results showed that vaccination with the microneedle patches was safe, with no adverse events reported. Local skin reactions to the patches were mostly faint redness and mild itching that lasted two to three days. No new chronic medical illnesses or influenza-like illnesses were reported with either the patch or the injection groups. Antibody responses generated by the vaccine, as measured through analysis of blood samples, were similar in the groups vaccinated using patches and those receiving intramuscular injection, and these immune responses were still present after six months. More than 70 percent of patch recipients reported they would prefer patch vaccination over injection or intranasal vaccination for future vaccinations. 

No significant difference was seen between the doses of vaccine delivered by the health care workers and the volunteers who self-administered the patches, showing that participants were able to correctly self-administer the patch. After vaccination, imaging of the used patches found that the microneedles had dissolved in the skin, suggesting that the used patches could be safely discarded as non-sharps waste. The vaccines remained potent in the patches without refrigeration for at least one year.

The microneedle patches used in the study were designed at Georgia Tech and manufactured by the Global Center for Medical Innovation in Atlanta. 

Prausnitz has been working for many years to develop the microneedle patch technology. “It’s very gratifying and exciting to have these patches tested in a clinical trial, and with a result that turned out so well. We now need to follow this study with a phase II clinical trial involving more people, and we hope that will happen soon.”

The researchers also are working to develop microneedle patches for use with other vaccines, including measles, rubella and polio.

“From the very start of this project,” said Prausnitz, “our team at Georgia Tech has been working with the Emory team to develop the microneedle patches, and the success of the project has been due to the strong collaboration between Georgia Tech engineers and the bioscience and medical experts at Emory.” Prausnitz holds the J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

The authors summarized: “Influenza vaccination using microneedle patches is well-tolerated, well-accepted, and results in robust immunologic responses, whether administered by health care workers or by the participants themselves. These results provide evidence that microneedle patch vaccination is an innovative new approach with the potential to improve current vacination coverage and reduce immunization costs.” 

In addition to Rouphael and Prausnitz, other study authors include co-senior author Mark J. Mulligan, M.D., executive director of the Hope Clinic of the Emory Vaccine Center; Emory researchers Michele Paine, Regina Mosley, Paula M. Frew, Tianwei Yu, Natalie J. Thornburg, Sarah Kabbani, Lilin Lai, Elena V. Vassilieva, Ioanna Skountzou, and Richard W. Compans; and Georgia Tech researchers Sebastien Henry, Devin V. McAllister, Haripriya Kalluri, and Winston Pewin. 

This study was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health (U01 EB012495). One of the researchers received support through a training grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (T32 AI074492). The Georgia Research Alliance provided instrumentation support. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

Prausnitz has co-founded a company called Micron Biomedical that is licensing patents related to this study. Micron Biomedical is poised to move the microneedle patch technology forward, bring it further into clinical trials, commercialize it and ultimately make it available to patients. 

Prausnitz and several other Georgia Tech researchers are inventors of the microneedle patch technology used in this study and have ownership interest in Micron Biomedical. They are entitled to royalties derived from Micron Biomedical’s future sales of products related to the research. These potential conflicts of interest have been disclosed and are overseen by Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. 

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181 USA

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon, Georgia Tech (jtoon@gatech.edu); 404-894-6986) or Holly Korschun, Emory University (hkorsch@emory.edu); 404-727-3990.

Writer: Holly Korschun

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Anna Grosberg, University of California Irvine

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Bryan McCloskey, University of California, Berkeley

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Greg Thurber, University of Michigan

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Yannis Kevrekidis, Johns Hopkins University

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David Flaherty, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Roger Pielke Jr., University of Colorado

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Aditya Bhan, University of Minnesota

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Stacey Bent, Stanford University

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Francois Baneyx, University of Washington

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LaShanda Korley, Case Western Reserve University

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David Sholl, School Chair, GT ChBE

"How To Have Outrageously Good Ideas"

Meet in Lower Atrium of Ford ES&T building at 10 a.m. each day.

Meet in Lower Atrium of Ford ES&T building at 10 a.m. each day.

Meet in Lower Atrium of Ford ES&T building at 10 a.m. each day.

Meet in Lower Atrium of Ford ES&T building at 10 a.m. each day.

Meet in Lower Atrium of Ford ES&T building at 10 a.m. each day.

Meet in Lower Atrium of Ford ES&T building at 10 a.m. each day.

Meet in Lower Atrium of Ford ES&T building at 10 a.m.

Through this competition, 16 universities compete to redesign, build, and drive a Chevrolet Camaro that has a reduced environmental impact while still retaining the car’s speed, iconic look, and high performance.

Georgia Tech’s 60-person team, made up of master’s and bachelor’s degree students from mechanical, electrical, and chemical and biomolecular engineering majors, sent twelve representatives to the third stage of the competition.

According to the team’s profile, they “will be taking the car apart and putting it back together with new eco-friendly features in order to accomplish our goal of having a fully functional Hybrid Electric Camaro. All while ‘Rambling Wrecking’ the competition.”

During this year’s challenge, the team brought their prototype to Michigan for the first week-long stage, where the vehicle was subjected to safety and technical inspections that allowed it to qualify for the road test. They also participated in an autocross event, where they demonstrated the car’s ability to handle real-world driving situations.

Stage two of the competition was held in Washington, D.C. from May 21 to 25, where Tech’s team formally presented their prototype through presentations, demonstrations, and further testing.

Georgia Tech’s team was one of only four to complete an over-one-hundred-mile endurance test in order to measure efficiency and emissions. They were the only team to complete it on the first try. They also were awarded best mechanical presentation, best system modeling simulation and controls presentation, and best demonstration of advanced driver assistance systems.

Their various awards have them taking home $12,000 in prize money, which be put to use for next year’s round of the competition.

For the past three years, the team has been creeping up in its rankings; last year, they placed ninth overall, and in the first year they placed fifteenth.

The four-year-long EcoCAR 3 competition is a U.S. Department of Engineering and General Motors Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition. During the series, the students have come up with a plan for research and development, analysis, and validation of the vehicle design as they integrate powertrains and alternative fuels.

Participating students in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) include Sterling Smith and Greg Chipman (who attended the competition), as well as Andrew Krohn, Ariana Rahgozar, and Madhura Ramakrishnan. Profesor Thomas Fuller of ChBE is one of the team’s advisors.

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Developing active, stable, and selective electrocatalyst materials for chemical transformations in renewable energy

Chemical transformations are ubiquitous in today's global-scale energy economy. The ability to catalyze chemical reactions efficiently will continue to be critically important as we aim to enable a future energy economy based on renewable, sustainable resources. This talk will focus on our efforts to develop catalytic materials for ambient-temperature, ambient-pressure processes involving the electron-driven production and consumption of fuels and chemicals, reactions that could play key roles for future energy technologies. More specifically, this talk will address catalyst development for electrocatalytic H₂ generation from water and the synthesis of hydrocarbons and alcohols from CO₂. If coupled to renewable sources of electricity (e.g. wind and solar), these two reactions could produce important fuels and industrial chemicals in a sustainable manner, avoiding fossil resources. This talk will also discuss recent efforts to develop improved catalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), a major challenge in developing more efficient fuel cells and metal-air batteries. Common catalyst materials for these three reactions face challenges in terms of activity, selectivity, stability, and/or cost and earth-abundance. This talk will describe approaches used in our research group to understand the governing principles guiding the reaction chemistry, as well as strategies to tailor the surface chemistry of materials through control of morphology, stoichiometry, and surface structure at the nano- and atomic-scale in order to overcome performance barriers in catalyzing these reactions.

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Polymer Solar Cell, Deconstructed 

We have successfully constructed polymer solar cells having bulk-heterojunction as well as bilayer structures by soft-contact lamination. This process entails fabricating and processing functional components individually; these separate components are then brought together in a final step to complete the devices. Physical contact occurs non-destructively at room temperature and ambient pressures so this process is particularly suitable for manipulating chemically and mechanically fragile organics. 

In the construction of inverted polymer solar cells having bulk-heterojunction structures, this process involves a substrate that supports the bottom electrode and the active layer of the polymer solar cells as well as an elastomeric substrate that supports the top electrodes. Lamination of the top substrate against the bottom substrate establishes electrical contact. Given the modularity of this process, the top electrodes can be readily removed after post-deposition processing and device testing so the active layer can be characterized. This interface is otherwise inaccessible in devices that are fabricated by conventional bottom-up approaches. Grazing-incidence x-ray diffraction carried out on the once-buried interface of inverted polymer solar cells of poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and [6,6]-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) indicates that PCBM crystallinity, as opposed to P3HT crystallinity, increases significantly when the devices are annealed at higher temperatures. Quantification of two-dimensional x-ray patterns indicate PCBM readily adopts the triclinic crystal structure, with the (302) planes of the crystals preferentially oriented parallel to the substrate. This enhancement in PCBM crystallinity and its preferential orientation correlates positively with the measured short circuit current densities during device testing. We also find soft-contact lamination to be extremely robust; replacing the existing gold top electrodes with fresh gold electrodes results in quantitatively similar device characteristics.

In the same vein, we have demonstrated the successful construction of bilayer polymer solar cells by laminating thin films of polymer electron donors against those of electron acceptors.  The fabrication of bilayer polymer solar cells by conventional bottom-up approaches is challenging as it necessitates one organic semiconductor to be deposited directly on top of another. As such, organics having comparable solubilities cannot be employed in a single cell because the solution deposition of one species on top of the other will induce solvent damage of the underlying organic semiconductor. This lamination approach has effectively allowed us to isolate the deposition and processing of the electron donor and acceptor; individually deposited and processed organic layers are only brought together in the final step to construct bilayer polymer solar cells. With this approach, we have been able to independently control the properties of the individual constituents. Systematic examination of such devices has enabled the decoupling of morphological transformations that take place in the individual layers; we have thus been able to map out structure-function relationships of the electron donor and electron acceptor using this platform.

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Engineering Motif-Specific Antibodies: A New Era for Cell Signaling

Highly complex signaling networks control biological processes ranging from development and homeostasis to cell death. Abnormal regulation of signaling networks can result in cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and diabetes. Consequently, a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms that underlie both normal and abnormal cellular responses will identify new disease-related markers and therapeutic targets. Cells employ a combination of biophysical and biochemical events to elicit a cellular response. In particular, chemical or post-translational modification (PTM) of key proteins provides cells with a highly dynamic way to both transmit and store information. However, accurate detection and quantification of PTMs often requires the generation of PTM-specific antibodies. Traditional antibody generation platforms that rely upon the immunization of animals or in vitro display methods exhibit poor success rates for the development of PTM-specific antibodies.

I will discuss a renewable synthetic antibody strategy to develop PTM-specific antibodies via the engineering of a novel motif-specific binding pocket into an antibody scaffold. Inspired by a natural phosphate-binding motif, I designed and structurally characterized antibody scaffolds with binding pockets specific for three common modifications: phosphoserine, phosphothreonine, and phosphotyrosine. The combination of these novel scaffolds with in vitro antibody generation methods then enabled the rapid generation of fifty phospho- and target-specific antibodies against 70% of the targets. Ultimately, this engineered scaffold strategy may provide a general solution for the rapid, robust development of renewable anti-PTM or anti-peptide antibodies for signaling, diagnostic, and therapeutic applications.

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This year's seminar speaker is Greg Garland, chairman and CEO of Phillips 66. His lecture is titled, "Operating Excellence: Good Ethics Makes Good Business."

Greg Garland is chairman and CEO of Phillips 66. A chemical engineer, Garland has more than 30 years of industry experience in technical and executive leadership positions within the oil and natural gas and chemicals industries.

Previously, Garland had served as senior vice president, Exploration and Production, Americas for ConocoPhillips since 2010. Prior to joining ConocoPhillips, Garland was president and chief executive officer of Chevron Phillips Chemical Company, which is now a joint venture between Phillips 66 and Chevron. Before his election to that position, Garland served Chevron Phillips as senior vice president, Planning & Specialty Chemicals. His prior experience includes serving as general manager of Qatar/Middle East for Phillips, a position he assumed in 1997. From 1995 to 1997, he served as general manager of natural gas liquids after serving as manager of planning and development in planning and technology. From 1992 to 1994, he was manager of the K-Resin® business unit.

Garland began his career with Phillips in 1980 as a project engineer for the Plastics Technical Center. He later worked as a sales engineer for Phillips’ plastics resins, business service manager for advanced materials, business development director, and olefins manager for chemicals.

He is chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer of Phillips 66 Partners. Garland also serves on the board of directors for DCP Midstream, the board and executive committee of the American Petroleum Institute, the board and the executive committee of Junior Achievement for Southeast Texas, the board for The Greater Houston Partnership, and as a member of the Engineering Advisory Board for Texas A&M University.

Garland received a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering from Texas A&M University in 1980.

_{Ethics, leadership, and quality, grounded in strong communication skills and professionalism, are essential components of an engineering education. To spotlight the importance of these core values, in 1995 the Phillips Petroleum Foundation awarded a grant to the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering to develop the Phillips 66/C.J. “Pete” Silas Program in Ethics and Leadership. Named in recognition of the outstanding professional achievements of Georgia Tech chemical engineering alumnus C.J. “Pete” Silas, who retired from Phillips Petroleum as president and CEO in 1994, the program focuses on technical and business decisions that have ethical ramifications. These topics, and related areas in engineering, technology, and ethics, are integrated into the core chemical and biomolecular engineering curriculum and are addressed in an annual public symposium featuring prominent industrialists and ethicists.}

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Interfacial Heterogeneity of Proteins at the Molecular Level

Interfaces are encountered in many experimental systems that alter the behavior of molecular adsorbates relative to bulk solution. For example, stable proteins in solution commonly aggregate and form films at interfaces that can inhibit industrial separations or long-term storage of drug products, alter the wear resistance of artificial joint surfaces, or mediate cellular responses to regenerative tissue scaffolds. Thus, there is intense interest in understanding exactly how interfacial properties influence molecular behavior. Common techniques for probing interfacial phenomena measure the average surface coverage, mobility (i.e. diffusion), molecular conformation, and macroscopic behavior (e.g. anti-adhesive qualities, catalytic activity, etc.). For lack of better information, it is widely assumed that all molecules behave as an average molecule, with a single net adsorption rate, diffusion coefficient, and so on. However, in many systems, important behavior stems from molecules that deviate significantly from the norm. 

This work addresses interfacial heterogeneity at the molecular level in a variety of different proteins that dynamically explore chemically modified glass surfaces. Single-molecule resolution, provided by total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy, allows independent, simultaneously occurring behaviors to be characterized separately. We have previously observed that, while direct attractions between proteins and surfaces are relatively weak, clusters of proteins exhibit surface residence times that increase exponentially with the number of constituents. This work will present several new observations in this area, including: direct measurements of cluster formation dynamics, surface-induced conformational changes, and the effect of surface-induced denaturation on the binding of fibronectin domains to model cell adhesion receptors. In total, these observations lead to a deeper understanding of interfacial phenomena than can be discerned from the average behavior.

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From molecules to devices, by controlling crystallization at interfaces

Molecular assembly processes, such as crystallization, aggregation, micro-phase separation etc, have a profound impact on the solid-state properties of materials. For instances, difference in crystal packing (polymorphism) influences bioavailability and stability of pharmaceutical compounds; morphology and molecular packing of organic semiconductors are critical to determining their charge transport characteristics; controlling the micro-phase separation is key to achieving high-efficiency organic solar cells. However, in all these areas, the level of control on molecular assembly attained in current solution processing methods fall far short of industrial requirements. This situation is due, in no small part, to the lack of fundamental understanding at molecular level.

In this talk, I will discuss strategies to control crystallization by designing interfaces, from their nanotopology, microstructure to surface chemistry. In the first example, I will present a study towards gaining fundamental understanding of heterogeneous nucleation, in the context of pharmaceutical manufacturing. Using nanostructured polymer substrates, I demonstrated contrary to the common belief that the shape of surface nanopores (10-100 nm), and the size of nanoscale confinement (0.7-2nm) are essential in determining the nucleation behavior. In the second example, I will discuss how the understanding of crystallization processes can be applied to solution printing of organic electronic devices. For the first time, I introduce the concept of flow engineering for controlling the thin film morphology of printed electronics (FLUENCE: fluid-enhanced crystal engineering). Herein, the flow engineering is achieved by designing the microstructure of the printing blade and the chemical patterns of the substrate. Enabled by this approach, highly-aligned single-crystalline organic thin-film transistors were fabricated, yielding unprecedented charge carrier mobility for the material studied. These examples show that the understanding and control of crystallization, and broadly speaking, molecular assembly processes, are key to manufacturing of next generation functional materials and devices in a wide range of areas, from energy, electronics, to healthcare.

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Hitching a ride at the nanometer scale: passive and active transport in complex media

Transport in crowded and complex media is a ubiquitous problem both in technology and biology in processes as diverse and far apart as flow of emulsions in nanoporous rocks and vesicle transport in biological cells. On a molecular scale, transport can be diffusive or driven. In this talk, I will introduce single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) as highly versatile multi-scale probes to investigate different modes of transport in media of increasing complexity. Using SWNTs as the ideal stiff filament, I will discuss the confined dynamics of stiff macromolecules in crowded environments, a common feature of polymer composites and the cell cytoskeleton. In fixed porous networks, SWNTs reptate in the network and rotational diffusion constant is proportional to the filament bending compliance and counter-intuitively, independent of the network porosity. In equilibrium and non-equilibrium biopolymer networks, the dynamics of SWNTs is more complex. I will discuss a newly developed microrheology technique in which we use nanotubes as “stealth probes” to measure viscoelastic properties of the host media. Finally I will present a quantitative study of the motions of molecular targets tagged with SWNTs in cells and whole organisms over times from ms to hours. In addition to thermal diffusion and directed motor protein transport, we document a new regime of active random “stirring” which may drive an intermediate mode of transport. The random stirring by the cytoskeleton should cause active diffusion in the narrow confines of the cell periphery leading to enhanced, non-specific transport. I will present a quantitative model connecting molecular mechanisms to these mesoscopic fluctuations.

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USING IONIC LIQUIDS FOR ENERGY APPLICATIONS

Ionic liquids (ILs) are organic salts that have sufficiently low melting points that, in their pure state, they are liquid around room temperature. Typical compounds are comprised of a quaternary ammonium, quaternary phosphonium, imidazolium or pyridinium cation with a wide variety of common anions. Since they are salts they have negligible vapor pressure so they do not evaporate and cause air pollution. We will discuss typical properties of ILs and, more importantly, how those properties can be tuned by the choice of cation, anion and substituents. Our emphasis is on the development of ILs for a variety of important energy-related applications.  In particular, we will discuss work on the design of ILs for gas separations, including removal of CO2 from post-combustion flue gas, pre-combustion gases, and natural gas. In some of these applications it is necessary to increase capacity and selectivity by including amine functionality in the ILs so that they can chemically react with CO2. We show how the use of amine functionalized aprotic heterocyclic anions can achieve 1:1 uptake with tunable reaction enthalpy and without increases in viscosity. We will also discuss the use of ILs for CO2/IL co-fluid vapor compression refrigeration. This system offers environmental advantages over conventional technology while improving coefficients of performance. Finally, we will show how the structure of the anion and cation can improve the ‘ionicity’ of ILs. This is important in the use of ILs as electrolytes for a wide variety of electrochemical applications, including lithium-ion batteries, dye sensitized solar cells, supercapacitors and electroplating.

The Cary Lecture Series in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering was established in 1984 as a memorial to Ashton Hall Cary, a chemical engineering graduate of Georgia Tech, Class of 1943. Mr. Cary served in the U.S. Army after graduation and later built a career in Georgia’s textile industry. He was a native of LaGrange, Georgia, where he was prominent in local politics and business and active in many charitable and civic organizations. At the time of his death in 1983, Mr. Cary was a production consultant for Kleen-Tex Industries.

The Cary Lecture Series was initiated with a gift from Dr. Freeman Cary, who also studied chemical engineering at Tech. Dr. Cary, who is Ashton’s brother, received his M.D. from Emory University in 1950 and later became the attending physician for the U.S. Congress. The Cary Lectureship Fund is used to sponsor a lecture series by distinguished scholars in fields of significance to chemical engineering. The visiting lecturers, in addition to presenting seminars on recent engineering advances, participate in informal discussions with Georgia Tech faculty and students.

• a technical talk (10-15 minutes) that introduces to the community a specific technique (experimental or computational) that is used successfully by the speaker’s group and which the group would like the community to know about, and

• a research presentation (30-35 minutes) by a different group, which discusses research in progress. This presentation can be used to introduce a topic and some preliminary results and should ideally end with an open question or a riddle that the presenter is currently trying to solve and that invites comments and suggestions from the audience and opens up a broader discussion.

For more information, call the FASET office at 404-894-6897 or follow this link.

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FASET, which stands for "Familiarization and Adaptation to the Surroundings and Environs of Tech," is Georgia Tech's orientation program for new undergraduate students (freshmen and transfers) as well as their parents, family members, and guests.  FASET has been a Georgia Tech tradition since 1972. 

During orientation new students will receive academic advisement, register for their first semester of courses, and complete other business items. In addition, Georgia Tech faculty, staff, and administrators will discuss important campus services, student organizations, the undergraduate curriculum, and academic programs. Most importantly, students, parents, and guests will have an opportunity to meet and interact with current Tech students as well as to get to know other new students, parents, and guests.

Transfer orientation is a one-day program to help acclimate you to Tech's campus, as well as give you time to meet with your academic advisor and to register for classes. FASET will take place from 7:30 am -5 pm. You will receive an email notification once you are accepted for spring semester. For more information call the FASET office at 404-894-6897.

Check-in and breakfast begins at 7:30 a.m. in the Student Center. For directions and parking information click here.

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The 2014 AIChE Clearinghouse will be held on Wednesday, Sept. 10, from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Molecular Science and Engineering (MoSE) Building Atriums on floors 1-4 (Campus Map).

Please note: To attend you must be a nationally registered AIChE member AS WELL AS a local Georgia Tech Chapter member. Students can register for National AIChE here.

Each year we also assemble a digital résumé book for all interested chapter members. This résumé book is distributed to all participating companies and is categorized by students searching for full-time, co-op or internship positions. We strongly encourage our members to submit their résumés for the consideration of all the companies in attendance as you may be unable to meet with every company. To assist you with the preparation of your résumé, see the Résumé Workshop presentation given by Dr. Victor Breedveld, and click here to view a sample résumé.

Below are the companies that will be present at the 2014 Clearinghouse.

• 3M
• Air Products
• Albemarle
• Arizona Chemical
• Arkema
• Ascend Materials
• BASF
• BP
• Chevron
• Clorox
• Colgate-Palmolive
• ConocoPhillips
• Dow
• Dow Corning
• Eastman
• Eli Lilly
• ExxonMobil
• General Mills
• Honeywell
• Kimberly-Clark
• Lyondellbasell
• Marathon Petroleum Company
• PepsiCo/Fritolay
• Phillips 66
• Procter and Gamble
• Rayonier
• Schlumberger
• Shell
• Solenis
• Solvay

Ph.D. students will receive their doctoral hood and be hooded by their advisor or a college representative. Diplomas will be distributed at the main Institute ceremony that evening. Ph.D. students are encouraged, but not required, to attend and will have the opportunity to RSVP when they submit their Commencement RSVP.

An RSVP will be required for students to attend this event. Students who are unable to attend will receive their hood during line-up at the Institute ceremony that Friday evening.

While at the President's Graduation Celebration, plan to:

• Meet and greet President Peterson, Provost Bras, faculty, staff and other students' families.
• Take photos with Buzz and the Ramblin' Wreck.
• Purchase Georgia Tech merchandise.
• Pick up your honor cords from the Registrar's Office.
• Visit with representatives from the Alumni Association and Athletic Association.
• Mingle with beloved faculty and staff who have assisted you throughout your career at Georgia Tech.

For more information: http://www.commencement.gatech.edu/celebration

Large Group Sessions in Ford ES&T L1205 from 10:00-12:00

Student Group Sessions in Ford ES&T L1118 from 10:30-12:00

Lunch in the Lower Atrium from 12:00-1:30

Registration in Computer Lab, Ford ES&T L2230, from 2:00-4:00

Large Group Sessions in Ford ES&T L1205 from 10:00-12:00

Student Group Sessions in Ford ES&T L1118 from 10:30-12:00

Lunch in the Lower Atrium from 12:00-1:30

Registration in Computer Lab, Ford ES&T L2230, from 2:00-4:00

Student Group Sessions in Ford ES&T L1118 from 10:30-12:00

Lunch in the Lower Atrium from 12:00-1:30

Registration in Computer Lab, Ford ES&T L2230, from 2:00-4:00

Student Group Sessions in Ford ES&T L1118 from 10:30-12:00

Lunch in the Lower Atrium from 12:00-1:30

Registration in Computer Lab, Ford ES&T L2230, from 2:00-4:00

The event is followed by a reception.

Abstract:

Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) is a chronic autoimmune disease affecting approximately 35 million individuals world-wide, with associated annual healthcare costs in the US estimated to be approximately $15 billion. Current treatment requires either multiple daily insulin injections or continuous subcutaneous (SC) insulin infusion (CSII) delivered via an insulin infusion pump. Both treatment modes necessitate frequent blood glucose measurements to determine the daily insulin requirements for maintaining near-normal blood glucose levels.

More than 30 years ago, the idea of an artificial endocrine pancreas for patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) was envisioned. The closed-loop concept consisted of an insulin syringe, a blood glucose analyzer, and a transmitter. In the ensuing years, a number of theoretical research studies were performed with numerical simulations to demonstrate the relevance of advanced process control design to the artificial pancreas, with delivery algorithms ranging from simple PID, to H-infinity, to model predictive control. With the advent of continuous glucose sensing, which reports interstitial glucose concentrations approximately every minute, and the development of hardware and algorithms to communicate with and control insulin pumps, the vision of closed-loop control of blood glucose is approaching a reality.

In the last 10 years, our research group has been working with medical doctors on clinical demonstrations of feedback control algorithms for the artificial pancreas. In this talk, I will outline the difficulties inherent in controlling physiological variables, the challenges with regulatory approval of such devices, and will describe a number of process systems engineering algorithms we have tested in clinical experiments for the artificial pancreas

Biography

Frank Doyle is the John A. Paulson Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he also is the John A. & Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor. Prior to that he was the Mellichamp Professor at UC Santa Barbara, where he was the Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Director of the UCSB/MIT/Caltech Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, and the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Engineering.

He received a B.S.E. degree from Princeton, C.P.G.S. from Cambridge, and Ph.D. from Caltech, all in Chemical Engineering. He has also held faculty appointments at Purdue University and the University of Delaware, and held visiting positions at DuPont, Weyerhaeuser, and Stuttgart University.

He has been recognized as a Fellow of multiple professional organizations including: IEEE, IFAC, AIMBE, and the AAAS. He is the President for the IEEE Control Systems Society, and is the Vice President of the International Federation of Automatic Control. In 2005, he was awarded the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award from the AIChE for his innovative work in systems biology, and in 2015 received the Control Engineering Practice Award from the American Automatic Control Council for his development of the artificial pancreas. His research interests are in systems biology, network science, modeling and analysis of circadian rhythms, and drug delivery for diabetes.

Refreshments will be served.

About the Monie A. Ferst Award:
The award is given annually to an educator in engineering or science who has made “notable contributions to the motivation and encouragement of research through education.” Its purpose is to “recognize significant contributions to scientific research by an educator in engineering or science.” The award consists of a medal and $10,000. Since 1977, it has been given to educators who have inspired their students and colleagues to significant research achievements.

Schedule:

8:15-8:45: Continental Breakfast

8:45-9:00:  Welcome address

9:00-9:30: Michael Dickey, NCSU, “Patterning and Actuating Soft Materials”

9:30-10:00: Qinghuang Lin, IBM, “Wafer-Scale Nanofabrication for Detecting and Controlling Single DNA Molecules: A Tribute to Professor Grant Willson”

10:00-10:15: Break

10:15-10:45: Brian Long, University of Tennessee, “Siloxane Functionalized Polynorbornenes as Gas Separation Membranes”

10:45-11:15: Scott M. Grayson, Tulane University, “Cyclic polymers: Synthesis and potential applications”

11:15-11:45: Clifford Henderson, Georgia Tech, “Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Large Scale Nanomanufacturing Using Block Copolymer Directed Self Assembly”

12:00-1:00: Break

1:15-1:45: Jodie Lutkenhaus, Texas A&M University, “Advanced Functional Layer-by-Layer Nanocoatings: Graphene, MOFs, MXenes and More”

1:45-2:15: Keith Keitz, University of Texas, “Mesoporous Materials and Amyloid Formation”

2:15-2:45: Christopher Bates, University of California-Santa Barbara, “Connecting Macromolecular Architecture and Properties”

2:45-3:25: Jared Schwartz, Oluwadamilola Phillips, and Anthony Engler, Georgia Tech: “Vaporizing Polymers: Synthesis, Stability and Photo-sensitization”

3:25-4:00: Break

4:00-5:00: Award presentation and address

5:00-6:00: Reception with refreshments