Category: News

AURORA (Autonomous Utah Resource for Open Research Automation), led by Prof. Sparks, has been selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as one of the nation’s 20 Programmable Cloud Laboratory (PCL) Nodes. AURORA is pioneering a new model for scientific research by enabling investigators to remotely design, execute, and analyze experiments through a cloud-based platform. Much as cloud computing revolutionized access to high-performance computing resources, AURORA will make advanced experimental facilities more accessible, programmable, scalable, and reproducible. The platform will provide researchers from universities, industry, and government laboratories with remote access to sophisticated experimental capabilities that have traditionally been available only at a limited number of specialized research facilities, accelerating discovery and broadening participation in cutting-edge materials research.

 

AURORA will build upon two highly successful NSF investments; MonArk, a factory of the future for robotic assembly of 2D materials, and CloudLab, a platform for accessing remote infrastructure. The result is a first of its kind AI-enabled self-driving laboratory; users leverage AI to design as well as actualize experiments to construct 2D heterostructures. AURORA includes stages for exfoliation, optical characterization, stacking, device fabrication, cryogenic transport measurements, and archival in a unified closed-loop platform that learns from each new experiment.

Assistant Professor Chen Wang of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Utah has received a $125,000 grant from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund to study petroleum-derived solid reactants for photopolymerization.

Why it matters: Photopolymerization uses light to rapidly turn reactive molecules into polymers and is widely used in 3D printing, coatings, adhesives, and packaging. Most current systems rely on liquid resins, which severely limit the final material’s properties and functionality. Wang’s project explores a different route: photopolymerization of solids, which could produce tougher, stronger materials with a wide range of functionalities, such as biodegradability.

• $125,000 in funding for the proposal “Fundamental Study of Petroleum-derived Solid Reactants for Photopolymerization,” for two years.

How it works: Wang’s group will study how crystallinity, hydrogen bonding, and thermal processing affect the reaction kinetics, semicrystallinity, and mechanical properties of photopolymerized materials. In particular, the roadmap for manipulating the semicrystallinity of network polymers remains poorly understood.

“The future of 3D printing will depend not only on better printers, but on fundamentally new materials,” Wang said. “By moving beyond liquid resins and studying reactive solids, we unlock a vast landscape of structure-processing-property relationships in photopolymers.”

What’s next: Wang’s team aims to build a fundamental understanding of how to map mechanical properties in photopolymerized polymer networks. The results will inform the development of new materials for advanced manufacturing, such as stereolithography 3D printing, to obtain parts with superb thermal and mechanical performance. This study is built upon several recent study from Wang’s group; for further information, see the group website http://www.chenwanglab.com.

Congratulations to Michael Robison on receiving the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP), a highly prestigious and competitive award recognizing outstanding graduate students with exceptional research potential. This fellowship is a significant national honor and reflects Michael’s talent, hard work, and promise as an emerging researcher. We are proud to celebrate this tremendous achievement.

The United States doesn’t have a commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing facility and has been at an impasse for decades on a permanent repository to deal with spent nuclear waste. There’s a growing federal appetite to build and operate a domestic nuclear recycling facility, and Utah wants to be top of mind. Read more HERE.

Titanium is as strong as steel—yet it’s only half the weight. So, using titanium in airplane construction, for example, would reduce fuel consumption and make flying more sustainable. Unfortunately, producing titanium is very expensive. But that is changing: Zhigang Zak Fang, U professor of metallurgical engineering, has found a way to produce high-quality titanium powder relatively inexpensively.

Fang developed the hydrogen-assisted metallothermic reduction (HAMR) process, which uses hydrogen and magnesium synergistically to produce the precious metal. Fang’s method also cuts carbon emissions, which creates a greener process. For that effort, and other innovations over his career—including 60 patents—Fang won the Humboldt Research Award and R&D 100 Award in 2023. “In the past, using only magnesium to create titanium didn’t work as well,” Fang says of his project, funded by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

Under another DOE-funded venture, Fang and his colleague Pei Sun PhD’15 are looking for a new way to produce iron and steel that will use less energy and release fewer emissions. “The goal is to decarbonize the steelmaking industry,” Fang says.

Read Article in University of Utah Magazine HERE

https://magazine.utah.edu/issues/fall-2024/innovation-university/

 

Crabtree’s announcement through the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) recently detailed that $45 million has been awarded in federal funding for six projects to create regional consortia to accelerate the development of critical mineral and materials (CMM) supply chains including novel non-fuel carbon-based products from secondary and unconventional feedstocks.

Realizing the value of secondary and unconventional feedstocks, such as coal and coal by-products, effluent waters from oil and gas development, and acid mine drainage will enable the U.S. to rebuild domestic supply chains for CMM. By focusing on abundant American secondary and unconventional sources, these investments will support dependable and enduring supplies for American manufacturing and production of technologies essential to clean energy and the nation’s defense.

“DOE is investing in collaborative regional projects to help us realize our nation’s full potential for recovery of these vital resources,” continues Crabtree, “while creating high-wage jobs and delivering environmental benefits for communities across the United States.”

The six selected projects will build upon the work of DOE’s Carbon Ore, Rare Earth and Critical Minerals (CORE-CM) Initiative, expanding the focus from the basin scale to cover eight regions across the nation. Teams consist of partners such as private industry; universities; local, state, and federal government; local communities; and Tribes and Tribal organizations who will develop and implement strategies that enable each U.S. region to realize its economic critical minerals and materials potential, including valuable non-fuel carbon-based products. Principal investigator Michael Free of the U’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering will head up this important work in the Rocky Mountains known as Region 6.

Read more HERE.

U Researchers Secure Major Funding to Advance Critical Metals Production

Think about the device you’re reading this on. Whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, or laptop, it contains dozens of rare earth elements and critical metals that make its operation possible. Yet the United States currently relies on foreign sources for approximately 90% of some of these essential materials, creating vulnerabilities in our supply chain for everything from consumer electronics to clean energy technology.

The University of Utah is taking bold steps to address this challenge. Mike Free and Prashant Sarswat, metallurgical engineers from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering,have secured two significant funding awards to advance innovative technologies for rare earth elements (REE) and critical metals (CM) processing.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded $220,446 for developing refined REE and CM products at 90% purity. Additionally, the Department of Energy (DOE) has committed $5 million to support a comprehensive project focused on upgrading mineral resources and optimizing extraction and separation processes to achieve an exceptional 99% purity level for some individual REE and CM products.

“We’re starting with unconventional resources to build a larger supply chain here in the US,” explains Free, principal investigator on the projects and department chair. “We are exploring new approaches that are more environmentally friendly. Some of the technologies we’re developing, like our magnetic separation process, use no additional chemicals, which are very different from conventional processing that can require hundreds of steps and  typically involves substantial amounts of acid.”

The research team, which includes graduate students Easton Sadler and Benjamin Schroeder, is developing innovative separation techniques, including a unique device that uses strong magnets to separate rare earth elements based on their magnetic properties. They are also exploring new environmentally friendly extraction methods using specialized materials that can selectively absorb specific elements.

READ MORE HERE

Electronic waste, or e-waste, is a rapidly growing global problem, and it’s expected to worsen with the production of new kinds of flexible electronics for robotics, wearable devices, health monitors, and other new applications, including single-use devices.

A new kind of flexible substrate material developed at MIT, the University of Utah, and Meta has the potential to enable not only the recycling of materials and components at the end of a device’s useful life, but also the scalable manufacture of more complex multilayered circuits than existing substrates provide.

[READ MORE]

Prof. Chandran has been recently awarded new Phase II funding (~$3M) for his ARPA-E project on the design and development of high temperature niobium alloys for gas turbines and other structural applications. The Phase II funding will make the cumulative ARPA-E funding, since 2021, as about $4.5M. Dr. Chandran’s proposal was one of the four selected and funded after the Phase II competition nationwide. Significant accomplishments of Chandran’s group in Phase-I practical alloy development, as well as plans for commercialization by a leading commercial producer, have been the major factors for the Phase II award. The research will support several graduate students in Dr. Chandran’s group. The ARPA-E funding also supports the acquisition of advanced mechanical testing equipment and a high temperature vacuum heat-treating furnace, with a cost of about $0.5M, in support of the advanced physical metallurgy research in the department.

A new infusion of federal funding through the Department of Energy (DOE) totaling $28 million will support some of the most cutting-edge efforts to decarbonize the dirty steel industry, and the University of Utah has received the largest award (~ $3.5 million) of the 13 projects in nine states.

The initiative, through the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) aims to spur solutions that can eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from the ironmaking process and sharply reduce emissions across the entire steel supply chain, according to an announcement shared with Canary Media, dedicated to news about cleaning up heavy industry.

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