MRS Meetings Blog

Coke bottles that talk

Very soon, be prepared to see the labels on your milk carton or coke bottle move, make music or even talk to you. Just attended a symposium E talk by Darin Laird from Plextronics, in which he presented a future where flexible organic photovoltaics (a.k.a organic solar cells or OPVs) may be used to make dynamic labels on consumer products. The technology will be similar to electronic paper technology popularized by e-readers like Kindle, but the ability to harness energy may enable the football star on your coke bottle to directly sell the product to you. A fascinating thought......we still have to make OPVs stable, more efficient and of course cheaper.

Right now such solar cells are made by blending a light absorbing polymer (P3HT) with an electron transporter like PCBM (functionalized C-60) to form a bulk heterojunction device. So far, the highest attained power conversion efficiency is 8.3 % and experts suggest that the technology could be commercially viable if this value can be beefed up to at least 10 %.

 

Bio-sensors

I caught a few talks about bio-sensors this morning, and they were all very good.  I think that presenting research for bio-sensors or other bio-tools can be difficult because, generally speaking, the presenter is an expert in the device, designed the device to specifications, and is not an expert in the biology or medical aspects of whatever problem they are trying to solve.  However, someone in the audience may have a personal connection with the disease/disorder/problem of concern, which can lead to emotions coming front-and-center in a question-answer period.

Polymers

I made it to the morning session of MRS today and attended two talks in session JJ: Nanostructured Polymeric Materials--Synthesis and Assembly. The talk by Professor Coughlin was quite interesting! He was looking at polymers derived from silsesquixane (talk about a tongue twister!) or carborane building blocks. According to him, the synthesis of these polymers can be controlled quite while through chemistry techniques. Though he had slides filled with reactions, they actually seemed quite manageable and not something that would be hard to create on a large scale.

For the polymers derived from carborane building blocks, he mentioned an interesting application of using in cancer treatment. Theoretically, this actually seems rather promising though he suggests that research for this application is still in its early stages. Will be back for another polymer talk later today!

Batteries for next generation electric cars

This morning I took a detour from photovoltaics talks and headed to sympsium KK for my adviser Arumugam Manthiram's invited lecture. He spoke about using a microwave reactor to synthesize olivine materials for high capacity Li ion batteries. Olivine materials like LiFePO4 are considered to be a environmentally friendly alternative to the layered LiCoO2 materials used in our laptops, cellphones etc. The problem is that these materials are notoriously difficult to make and that's where the microwave helps. These materials can now be made in less than 5 minutes and can be in-situ coated  to enhance electronic conductivity. As an added bonus, the electrochemical properties of the battery are significantly improved. Unlike Co, which is both toxic and unstable, the presence of Fe in Olivines makes them excellent candidates for making electric car batteries.

ref: “Rapid, Size-controlled, Microwave-Solvothermal Synthesis of Phospho-olivine Nanorods and Their Coating with a Mixed Conducting Polymer for Lithium Ion Batteries,” Electrochemistry Communications 10, 903-906 (2008)

 

What's your dream outfit for a holiday party this year?

It's Only Tuesday and I have already seen so much. The Plenary Lecture left me in awe, the Mastering Science Presentation Seminar was enlightening and I recommend that to everyone. I wonder what today will bring...

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Poster Session - Monday

My scheduled poster session was tonight, so I did not get a chance to view others' posters.  However, I did have a number of interesting conversations at my poster, so thanks to anyone who stopped by.  I really enjoy talking about posters (instead of giving slide-based talks) because as I'm describing my research to a person, I can *see* that lightbulb go off that tells me they understand what I'm trying to communicate, and it happens over and over again for each person that comes around.  I also benefit from the instant feedback enabled by poster sessions.  I am not used to speaking so much, and I was talking to people for almost the entire 3 hours, so now my voice is completely shot. 

At some point, a few CWRU alumni ended up at my poster at the same time, which was pretty neat.  At the end of the session, a couple of the women from the Womens Professional Development Workshop stopped by, and it was nice chatting with them again!

 

 

Monday afternoon

Wow, what a day!  From a number of great talks to Symposium X to the plenary lecture-- so interesting to see what "materials research" means to different people.  This afternoon I attended Symposium G, specifically to learn about fabrication strategies for energy applications.  I learned about laser-induced forward transfer, and its potential effects on a transferred material.  I can appreciate this since much of my work requires laser patterning, then trying to figure out if the laser interaction affected my material.

I also attended the Mastering Science Presentations video session, and was surprised that it was down to standing room only (I got a chair, though!).  I thought some good points were made, and my advisor will be happy to hear that many of his tips regarding slide design were also discussed in this presentation.

 

1 million horsepower and counting..

If Day 1 is any indication, energy is one of THE main topics being discussed, debated and argued about at this MRS meeting. As someone working on the energy challenge, I was pleasantly relieved to hear Christopher Barty from LLNL speak about the possibility of building the world's first Mega Joule facility by combining no less than 192 high energy laser beams each more powerful than the next biggest laser on the planet. Oh, did I mention that these pulsed laser beams must be precisely coupled into a 10 mm long gold can containing the nuclear material, generating temperatures over a million deg K and terrabars of pressure. If all goes well, the result will be a highly controlled fusion reaction that can create enough energy to power our world.

It's true this sounds unbelievable, but i strongly believe the energy mess we are in is what is truly unbelievable. The only solution is to dream big.. and I mean really big. One technology or one idea may not be enough. We need solar, wind, biofuels, batteries, fuel cells....and yes we need our own 1 million horsepower laser driven fusion reactor.

 

Plenary Session with Christopher Barty

The plenary session tonight had a great presentation by Christopher Barty from the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. In the first ten minutes of the presentation, he showed an animation of the extricate laser system that they plan to create in order to study fusion in the laboratory. If you've seen the movie Angels and Demons , the video was not far off from the one in the movie where they created antimatter, except they are actually going to create this thing.

The structure is the size of three football fields, and the speaker went through many statistics of the enormous amount of material needed to build the complex and the laser system. The main application of the research project would be for national security, but according to Dr. Barty, they hope to allow different research groups from over the world to use the system. To think of this enormous complex for the purpose of focusing 192 lasers on a volume a millimiter cubed really gives me an idea of the order of magnitude of energy needed to cause fusion. How near of a "future" this is though, seems a little up in the air.

Outreach in Materials Science

At the Symposium X today, there was a preview and a panel discussion on the new NOVA series "Making Stuff" that will be premiering January 19th.  The videos they showed looked pretty entertaining but didn't seem to contain much in the way of science.  The panel explained, that to make a TV show work, you really need to scale back the scientific detail by a lot.  The show's producer made this comment, "You know how they say a picture is worth 10,000 words? Well, an hour long TV show is worth about 5!"  The idea of the show is to present materials science to the laymen which will be great for materials science. The host of the panel suggested that as materials scientists, we should take the initiative to add science to the show by doing our own outreach.