The award opens up two opportunities to the University, says U.S. Sen. Majority Leader Charles Schumer, who advocated for the proposal. It provides $500,000 in technical assistance funding that the University will use to develop its proposal to turn the Southern Tier into an energy technology hub. It also allows the University to compete in Phase 2 of the challenge.

“This award will make the New Energy NY project eligible for up to $100 million in federal funding to transform the Greater Binghamton area and broader upstate New York region, create thousands of jobs, fuel the innovation necessary to combat climate change, and importantly, strengthen a critical area of the U.S. domestic manufacturing supply chain,” Schumer says. “I am proud to have fought for the New Energy NY project to be selected for Phase 1 and I will continue to fight tooth and nail to secure the final award and supercharge this growing area of the Upstate New York economy.”

This initiative will not only create jobs and improve the regional economy; it’s also crucial to our nation’s energy goals and energy security efforts, says chemist M. Stanley Whittingham, Binghamton University distinguished professor and 2019 Nobel laureate.

“Our NENY proposal can turn our region into an energy technology hub that has the potential to turn out advancements that will have national and global impacts,” Whittingham says.

With the appropriate support, Binghamton can become a national hub for battery innovation, manufacturing and workforce development, University President Harvey Stenger said. “We thank Sen. Schumer for his support on this as well as all that he does for our University and we thank the EDA for understanding and supporting our vision and providing us the necessary resources to move this forward,” he said.

The University has a track record of successful collaborations with industry partners, says Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research at Binghamton. “We’re fortunate to have an experienced, well-respected innovator like Stan leading the way and pushing our region and our country to take bold action for a more environmentally friendly future,” Sammakia says.

Binghamton was chosen by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) for the project, which will bring together the University, SUNY Broome Community College, Rochester Institute of Technology, NY-BEST and others to develop a proposal for Phase 2 of the competition. The proposal will focus on expanding research, development, testing and workforce assets to meet the demand of the emerging battery manufacturing industry in the Southern Tier and upstate New York.

“Binghamton University is honored and excited to lead a coalition of premier organizations from across New York State to help the U.S. meet the critical and growing demand for domestic battery products,” says Per Stromhaug, associate vice president of the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships and regional economic competitive officer for the project.

If fully funded, the project estimates that as many as 8,000 jobs would be created during a 10-year period.

Schumer said that the Build Back Better Regional Challenge received 529 Phase 1 applications from across the United States, and the New Energy NY project was one of 60 proposals selected as a Phase 1 awardee.

In Phase 2, the EDA will award 20 to 30 regional coalitions $25 million to $75 million, and up to $100 million, for projects to grow new regional industry clusters or scale existing ones through planning, infrastructure, innovation and entrepreneurship, workforce development, access to capital and more.

Binghamton University now boasts a No. 1 ranking in sustainability research from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

The campus is part of a five-way tie with Florida State University; University of California, Irvine; UC Merced and UC San Diego, which each earned a score of more than 100 percent.

Jessica Hua, an assistant professor of biology, says although she is not surprised Binghamton ranks at the top for sustainability research, she is glad her community is getting the recognition it deserves.

“I think we know that we have committed people here doing research on this topic that work so hard, so to get that recognition is fantastic,” Hua says. “It wasn’t on my radar, but in terms of the quality of research I am not surprised at all. My colleagues are incredible.”

AASHE ranks universities in 17 different subsets of sustainability based on self-reports. The research subset score is derived from the amount of research on sustainability, as counted by number of faculty and departments.

Binghamton’s report shows that of 601 faculty and staff who conduct research, 156 of them focus on sustainability. That 25.96 percent brought the campus well over the 15 percent needed for a perfect score.

The report also shows 42 departments have at least one faculty member who conducts research. Of the 42, 34 of them have at least one who conducts sustainability research. The 80.85 percent score also tops the “perfect” mark of 75 percent.

To put a spotlight on key subjects, the University created five Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence (TAEs) in 2013. One of the TAEs focuses on Sustainable Communities. Carl Lipo, director of environmental studies, and Robert Holahan, associate professor in environmental studies, co-chair the TAE and bring faculty together from several departments.

“The TAE’s goal has always been to bring people from across campus with a similar research interest together,” Holahan says. “There’s 10 of us from the TAE who got together and have been working on a series of papers on sustainable communities. Without having a centralized foci, a place to go once a week, how are you going to meet those people?”

In addition to sparking research collaborations, the TAE also awards seed grants to support research and hosts a sustainability lecture series. A dozen faculty and staff members make up the TAE’s steering committee; about 30 people receive the group’s newsletter.

Hua, who participates in the TAE, runs a research lab focused on wetlands ecology and conservation. Much of the lab’s research looks at artificial stressors on populations, such as the effect of road salt on amphibians.

Hua says conservation research findings need to be presented in a way that the general public can understand.

“I think how we link conservation and sustainability in our research is really through education,” she says. “What that means to me is to link art and science through art shows that tell the story of our publications, children’s books to get kids interested in ecology and parasite ecology, things like card games and lesson plans for K through 12 educators.”

Binghamton’s proposed Nuthatch Hollow Living Building is another signature effort in sustainability. Besides being a center for sustainability education, the University also aims for it to be one of the few in the world to meet the Living Building Challenge standards, which require buildings to produce more energy than they use.

Mark Poliks, chair of the Smart Energy TAE, says research and innovations in smart energy are building blocks to a sustainable future and projects like the living building.

“The Smart Energy TAE is really involved in the technology that could eventually go into a learning building, or go into a facility where energy is being managed, energy is being harvested or energy is being stored,” Poliks says.

Faculty members associated with the Smart Energy TAE fit into four broad areas: solar and thermoelectric energy harvesting, energy storage, energy efficiency in electronic systems and sensor development for energy resource management. Some researchers in this group are looking at battery efficiency and alternative energy harvesting, like solar cells, to provide a more sustainable future.

“More and more homes are having solar on it, and as the technology gets upgraded it will be both safe and affordable to have an appropriate battery pack in the house so that you can power the house in the evening and not have to rely on the grid,” Poliks says.

Lipo says Binghamton’s attention to sustainability helped him decide to come to work here four years ago. Now, he says, the AASHE ranking will promote the idea even more.

“We want our campus to be known for sustainability,” Lipo says. “This recognition will attract even more students and faculty who are passionate about sustainability and we will continue to grow in that regard.”

“This opportunity is one I didn’t envision even five years ago,” says Louis Piper, associate professor of physics at Binghamton and the principal investigator for the grant, awarded last week. “We didn’t think it would be possible.”

The instrument, a HArd X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy system (or HAXPES), allows researchers to get detailed information about a device or material without taking it apart.

HAXPES relies on the photoelectric effect, one of the most important tools in condensed matter physics and in materials science (and the basis for Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize). The machine shines light (in this case hard X-rays) into a material. The material accepts the energy and momentum and kicks out electrons. Conservation of energy and momentum allows researchers to determine the chemical and electronic structure of the material being studied.

This is the kind of energy you’d use for a chest X-ray at the hospital, Piper explains. And HAXPES will let him study a device like a battery in a way that leaves the battery intact, just like your doctor wouldn’t remove your rib cage for that chest X-ray.

“We can see what we previously couldn’t see,” Piper says.

That’s because other techniques are surface-senstitive. They’re good at scanning the outer layer of a device, but don’t offer a view of what’s inside. It would be like looking at a ham and cheese sandwich but only seeing the outermost crumbs on the bread. “It might not be a good representation of the material or what the material is like when it’s in contact with other materials,” Piper notes.

HAXPES requires a powerful source of X-rays and an extremely sensitive detector. The techniques associated with it have been used for about a decade, but previously were only possible with a synchrotron — a kind of particle accelerator that generates X-rays. At those facilities, visiting scientists typically conduct experiments over a period of hours and then leave.

HAXPES will provide synchrotron-comparable data in a laboratory setting, which makes it much more forgiving in terms of time and much more useful for private industry.

Compared to similar instruments, HAXPES offers more kinetic energy, which means excited electrons have a greater chance of escaping from deeper within the solid. That increases the tool’s sensitivity to the bulk of a material being examined. “Bulk” is a relative term in this case; HAXPES may go 60 nanometers deep into a material vs. 5 nanometers with other tools.

Still, at 60 nanometers, scientists will be able to access interfaces of real devices such as transistors. They’ll be able to measure energy levels and the chemical composition of buried interfaces without tearing them apart.

Piper, who is also the director of the Institute for Materials Research at Binghamton, says the new equipment dovetails with the campus’ industry-level capabilities. “We want to have unique tools that can act as a bridge between computational modeling and real-world applications,” he says.

The HAXPES, made by European company Scienta-Omicron, should be ready for use within two years at Binghamton’s Smart Energy R&D Building, part of the Innovative Technologies Complex.

The campus has a long history of industry partnerships and of creating multiuser laboratories to benefit academic and private R&D. The HAXPES should extend those collaborations in exciting ways, notes Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research and director of S3IP, a New York State Center of Excellence focused on electronics packaging research. “Equipment like this adds to our unique capabilities at Binghamton and brings value to our relationships with major technology companies and startups alike,” Sammakia says. “Louis is a national leader in this area, and I am eager to see what he can accomplish with HAXPES on campus.”

The HAXPES is about the size of a pickup truck, and Piper notes that the Binghamton tool will have several upgrades. “I consider it the Cadillac of HAXPES instruments,” he says.

That is, if a Cadillac could generate hard and soft X-rays and take low-temperature measurements as well as high-temperature measurements.

The instrument will have four key areas of focus:

• Batteries
• Next-generation electronics
• Neuromorphic computing
• Solar energy harvesting

In addition, researchers in the humanities may use the HAXPES’ small vacuum chamber to study pigments and clays. The tool will tie into Binghamton’s Materials Matter course, an interdisciplinary class that brings principles of science to life for humanities students and future scientists alike.

Piper sees the lab-based HAXPES enabling him and his colleagues to continue developing ways to describe chemical concepts to students from other disciplines.

He says he’s already seen firsthand how HAXPES could change materials research, as the technique allowed researchers to observe how electrons degrade and how that effects batteries’ performance.

“At Binghamton, we solve industry-relevant problems,” Piper says. “Photoemission has long been a powerful technique for materials studies, but has been largely been limited to sterile, perfect crystals. This instrument is very flexible and means we can measure real materials and devices even while they’re in operation. This tool means we’ll be able to make significant contributions in smart energy technologies.”

The battery combusted because of a phenomenon called “thermal runaway.” When the battery is heated to a certain temperature, a reaction occurs and causes the battery to generate heat, until eventually it decomposes.

Luckily, this situation virtually never happens, and that’s because of people like Carrie Kaplan. Kaplan, a fourth-year graduate student in chemistry at Binghamton University, is part of Battery 500, a project aimed at developing next-generation batteries with higher energy capacity. It’s her job to make sure these batteries are stable.

Thermal runaway issues were the cause of Boeing 787 fires that happened in recent years. These issues typically arise when batteries have a larger energy capacity.

“As you increase the energy level, the safety goes down,” says M. Stanley Whittingham, director of Binghamton’s Northeast Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES) and Kaplan’s advisor. “So you have this tradeoff between storage and safety.”

Kaplan studies thermal stability and searches for unwanted side reactions that may lead to decomposition. Using a differential scanning calorimeter, she increases the temperature of batteries and looks at changes in heat release.

If there is a high amount of heat released at a particular temperature, it indicates an unwanted reaction is occurring. That’s fine if the temperature, called the onset temperature, is high and relatively unreachable in a typical setting.

If the onset temperature is low, however, say 150°C, that’s a concern. That’s a temperature that can be feasibly reached, especially if the battery is in a car sitting on asphalt during a hot Arizona day.

Finding out what causes this decomposition is the challenge in Kaplan’s work. She is always moving around departments and using different technologies to understand what issues might arise.

“Is it because they’re organic? Is it because of the salt? Is it because of our material?” Kaplan wonders. “There’s a lot of different things that it could be, and we have to do further analysis to understand what exactly is happening.”

Kaplan, who’s from Ashburn, Virginia, did not expect to end up in battery work. At the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, she changed her major five times before ending up in chemistry because of an enthusiastic teacher.

“I took her class and knew that I was meant to do this,” Kaplan says. “She was so carefree. She would do these experiments in class, and I cannot count the amount of times she set the classroom on fire.”

While contemplating graduate school, Kaplan found out about the battery research at Binghamton, and she reached out to Whittingham.

“She’s a nice, easy person to work with, and a very good student,” Whittingham says.

Kaplan won the Lois D. Mackey Award, which goes to an outstanding first-year teaching assistant in general chemistry, and she received the Provost’s Doctoral Fellowship in the summers of 2017 and 2018. Now, she is the “safety and side reaction expert” for Battery 500.

He works with the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES), a network of professors, research scientists, post-docs and graduate students who aim to improve energy storage, focusing primarily on lithium-ion batteries.

These batteries power everyday portable devices such as cell phones and laptops as well as some cars.

They retain and transmit their power by cycling lithium ions (Li+) in and out of certain materials. Stan Whittingham, director of NECCES and Hidalgo’s advisor, says batteries can barely cycle one unit of Li+ at a time.

The compound Hidalgo and his colleagues are studying, called vanadium phosphate, is capable of cycling up to two. “The idea here is that the more lithium you can put in or remove, the more energy you can get out,” Hidalgo says.

To figure out what yields the best battery, Hidalgo and his colleagues tackle the compound from different perspectives.

“It’s almost like cooking. Depending on the pressure, depending on what I put inside, the products will be different, so usually I change something small, the pH, the concentration, the pressure, and the product will be completely different,” Hidalgo says. “If the material is what we want it to be, then we use it in a battery, we cycle it, and this process repeats.”

Hidalgo and his colleagues have successfully synthesized a battery that can cycle two lithium ions, and now they are moving on to develop batteries that can cycle more. “[Now] we’re looking at materials that have more than just one vanadium; the one I’m looking at now has 4, and so maybe we could have up to 8 lithium ions [cycled at a time],” Hidalgo says.

Hidalgo, who was born in Japan, moved to the Philippines when he was 7 years old. There, he completed an undergraduate degree in chemistry and materials science and engineering. He received a scholarship to complete a professional science master’s certificate at Binghamton, which trains students in business alongside their science degrees.

“For my scholarship, the idea is that the government will bring people here from other countries to study, and then for those people to bring what they learned back to their countries,” Hidalgo says. “Once I graduate, my plans are to go back home, work for a bit and see what my opportunities are.”

Hidalgo, who did research on solar cells as an undergraduate, says he plans to continue down the energy research path after he completes his graduate work in materials science and engineering.

“He could probably snap up any job he wanted,” says Whittingham, one of the inventors of the lithium-ion battery. “He’s got this natural leadership built into him. He’s enthusiastic; he goes and gets things done.”

Whittingham is one of 83 new members and 16 foreign members announced, bringing the academy’s total U.S. membership to 2,293 and the number of foreign members to 262. He will be inducted during the NAE’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 30.

Membership in the National Academy of Engineering honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature” and to “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.”

“Binghamton is very proud that the National Academy of Engineering has chosen to elect Distinguished Professor of Chemistry M. Stanley Whittingham to its ranks,” Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger said. “Professor Whittingham’s work has fundamentally changed the way the world stores and utilizes energy, making possible a revolution in consumer and industrial technologies. For nearly 30 years, Professor Whittingham has been one of the most visible and productive researchers at the University, and all of us at Binghamton congratulate him on this great honor.”

Whittingham, distinguished professor of chemistry and materials science at Binghamton University, joined the faculty in 1988 after 16 years at Schlumberger-Doll Research and Exxon Research and Engineering Company, where he received the patent for a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

He has been a pioneer in the development of lithium-ion batteries. He holds the original patent on the concept of the use of intercalation chemistry in high-power density, highly reversible lithium batteries – work that provided the basis for subsequent discoveries that now power most laptop computers.

“It is a great honor to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering,” Whittingham said. “The research I have been involved with for over 30 years has helped advance how we store and use energy at a foundational level, and it is my hope that this recognition will help to shine a much-needed light on the nation’s energy future.”

With 16 patents and more than 300 publications in leading scholarly journals, Whittingham has earned a national and international reputation as a prolific scientist. His research in the area of synthesis and characterization of novel transition metal oxides for energy storage and conversion, separations or as sensors has been continuously supported since his arrival in Binghamton, with over $7 million in federal research grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. He now directs the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage, an Energy Frontier Research Center supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Whittingham helped to establish the Materials Science and Engineering Program, bringing his creativity and innovation to Binghamton’s graduate curriculum as well as to its laboratories.

Working a great deal with ambient temperature, he and his research group emphasize novel approaches to synthesis that often allow structures to be formed that are unstable under the high temperatures normally used for preparing oxides.

Whittingham has been recognized by his peers with two major awards in recent years. In 2002, he was honored with the Battery Research Award of the Electrochemical Society for his many contributions to “Intercalation Chemistry and Battery Materials.” Two years later, he was elected a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society.

He has also been active in the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, the Electrochemical Society, and the Materials Research Society; and served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Chemistry of Materials and the Materials Research Bulletin. He was also the founder and principle editor of the journal Solid State Ionics, one of the two major journals in the field.

Whittingham earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford University, before coming to the United States as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University.

Tara P. Dhakal, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, was awarded a five-year, $500,000 NSF CAREER grant for his study “Toward Twenty Year Lifetime: Hermetic Sealing for Perovskite Solar Cells.” The proposal was one of just 11 to be funded in a field of 150 proposals.

“Most solar cells are made from silicon and, while those solar cells are highly efficient, they have their limitations,” says Dhakal, who also serves as interim director of Binghamton’s Center for Autonomous Solar Power.

His work focuses on solar cells made with perovskite, a crystalline mineral found in nature that has shown the potential to create solar cells that are just as efficient as the silicon-based type.

“Unfortunately, the current versions of perovskite solar cells are typically fabricated with toxic lead,” Dhakal says. He wants to replace lead with non-toxic germanium.

“Germanium and lead both come from column 14 on the periodic table,” Dhakal says. “Other researchers have tried, without success, to use tin for the same reason but I’ve found evidence that germanium has a better chance of success.”

If he is able to replace the lead in the perovskite solar cells, they could prove to be more environmentally friendly than other solar cells.

However, even with the lead removed, there is another issue that could prevent perovskite solar cells from being deployed for an extended period of time.

That’s why Dhakal’s study will also be looking at ways to make perovskite solar cells last longer.

“Lead perovskite solar cells have only lasted for several months under ideal laboratory conditions,” he says. “With my proposed sealing techniques, I predict that module lifetimes could be greater than 20 years.”

With Dhakal’s seal on the perovskite solar cells, they could have the same shelf life that silicon solar cells do. Without lead and with this sealing, the cells will become more practical for use — which Dhakal says will facilitate a wider reach for solar power.

“Silicon makes a robust solar cell but one thing it misses is flexibility,” he says. “The perovskite solar cells could be made on fabrics or plastics, which would make solar power much more accessible.”

Dhakal, who did his undergraduate work in Nepal, came to Binghamton as a research scientist in 2010 after earning a doctorate at the University of Florida.

Flexible electronics are exactly what they sound like. Current technologies include curved-screen phones and computer monitors. Eventually, consumers could see a flexible iPad in stores.

Tomlinson, a junior majoring in physics and mathematics, is involved in the Smart Energy research stream of the Freshman Research Immersion program (FRI), where he started this work by trying to reproduce flexible heterojunctions.

A heterojunction is the basic component of a thin film transistor, which has applications in LED lights and other electronic devices.

Most heterojunction materials crack when they are bent, which disrupts the flow of electricity. Finding heterojunction materials that can bend without cracking allows for the creation of flexible electronics.

This has already been accomplished; Tomlinson’s research builds upon earlier work. His efforts helped to refine the fabrication of a novel material for a piece of the junction.

Tomlinson then conducted research last summer to identify the hurdles that come with fabricating these junctions to set a strong foundation for further research by future FRI students.

“The incoming group of FRI students now working on this project are exploring a novel material that is very similar, chemically, to the one I explored over the summer,” Tomlinson says. “My research has made it so that the same model and parameters should work for this new material that they’re doing the research on.”

The applications also extend to solar panels.

“An LED is the opposite action to a solar cell; a solar cell absorbs light and an LED emits light,” Tomlinson says. “So you can have flexible solar panels that are easier to place than just the regular ones.”

Tomlinson, who grew up around the Finger Lakes, has been passionate about the sciences since high school. He was attracted to physics and math by the challenge of both subjects. “I’m drawn to the mysteries surrounding physics and how it fundamentally describes the world around me,” he says.

Marissa Civic, research assistant professor for the Smart Energy FRI stream, highlights Tomlinson’s dedication. “Peter is a strong student, very interested in science, and enjoys doing research,” she says. “Peter volunteered to do summer research in my lab; he spent hours a day in the lab working on his project as it interested him.”

Tomlinson also enjoys hiking, canoeing, camping and running. In high school he was on the cross country and track teams. “I enjoyed the exercise and being part of a team,” he says. “I now run recreationally and enjoy the days I can meet up with BU’s running club.”

Tomlinson says the flexible electronics project left him with a curiosity about other kinds of research. “I spent two years or so on the FRI project, and I want to get the most out of my college experience,” he says. “I think it would be exciting to explore new research opportunities.”

Pegor Aynajian, whose research focuses on quantum phase transitions, will receive $531,582 over five years through the NSF’s CAREER program, which supports early-career scientists.

Aynajian starts with a simple magnet you might find on your refrigerator when he explains phase transitions. “If you raise the temperature above its critical temperature, it becomes a regular metal,” he says of the magnet. “It won’t stick anymore. That’s called a phase transition.”

Specifically, that’s a thermal phase transition, just like the transition from water to ice. That’s a transition we see all the time. Now consider what would happen if we took a fridge magnet and cooled it to absolute zero, zero Kelvin (or −459.67 degrees Fahrenheit). Achieving a phase transition at absolute zero, say by tuning some parameter, can be remarkable, Aynajian says. Rather than thermal, though, it’s called a quantum phase transition.

“Near quantum phase transitions, new states of quantum matter are born,” he says. “We call it the physics of emergence.”

Under those conditions, scientists have found novel electronic phases — including superconductors — that aren’t seen otherwise.

Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity with absolutely no resistance, when cooled below a certain temperature.

This funding will accelerate Aynajian’s research into discovering emergent phases of matter with an emphasis on “unconventional” superconductors. He’s also interested in ferromagnetic superconductors, which are rare and poorly understood.

Aynajian’s group built a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), which uses quantum physics to “see” electrons on the surface of a sample. With this tool, they can observe the spatial patterns electrons form near a quantum phase transition. Many materials have never been studied this way before.

Aynajian’s group also uses X-rays and neutrons at research facilities around the world.

“Our STM is giving us new and unprecedented experimental results,” Aynajian says. “We can see what electrons do, how they form a new state of order, which did not exist before. Our next goal is to figure how we can ‘twist’ this order to create a new superconductor. Working directly with theorists helps us find ways to understand them further.”

Superconductors, which physicists have been studying for about a century, work at very low temperatures, which is a challenge to their practical use. In the past 30 years or so, physicists have found some materials that are superconductors at somewhat higher temperatures. If scientists can find a “room-temperature” superconductor, it would be a tremendous breakthrough for the electric grid and electronic devices of all kinds. That sort of technology could save billions of dollars in energy costs, Aynajian says.

Aynajian, who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2013, began studying superconductors in graduate school and continued working with them during a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University. He credits Bernhard Keimer, his graduate school mentor at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, with bringing him into the field.

The CAREER award will give Aynajian an opportunity to do some mentoring of his own, both with his graduate students and with children in Greater Binghamton. He plans to develop hands-on experiments and playful activities with superconductors, including a mini magnetic-levitation train, to inspire area students and offer some exposure to ideas in physics.

As for the experimental aspect of the project, he’s optimistic. “No matter what we find,” he says, “it will be interesting.”

Seokheun “Sean” Choi and two of his students developed the device, a microbial fuel cell that runs on the bacteria available in a few drops of dirty water. They report on their invention in a new paper published online in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

Choi previously developed a paper-based origami battery. The first design, shaped like a matchbook, stacked four modules together. The ninja star version, which measures about 2.5 inches wide, boasts increased power and voltage, with eight small batteries connected in series.

“Last time, it was a proof of concept. The power density was in the nanowatt range,” says Choi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. “This time, we increased it to the microwatt range. We can light an LED for about 20 minutes or power other types of biosensors.”

Paper-based biosensors include pregnancy tests and HIV tests. The sensitivity of such tests is limited, Choi says, and a battery like his could allow the use of more sophisticated fluorescent or electrochemical biosensors in developing countries. “Commercially available batteries are too wasteful and expensive for the field,” he says. “Ultimately, I’d like to develop instant, disposable, accessible bio-batteries for use in resource-limited regions.”

The new design folds into a star with one inlet at its center and the electrical contacts at the points of each side. After a few drops of dirty water are placed into the inlet, the device can be opened into a Frisbee-like ring to allow each of the eight fuel cells to work. Each module is a sandwich of five functional layers with its own anode, proton exchange membrane and air-cathode.

Choi’s original matchbook-sized battery could be produced for about 5 cents. The new ninja star device is more expensive — roughly 70 cents — in part because it uses not only filter paper but also carbon cloth for the anode as well as copper tape. The team’s next goal is to produce a fully paper-based device that has the power density of the new design and a lower price tag.

Choi prides himself on involving students in his research, and this paper represents a special triumph for co-author Landen Kwan, who worked on the project during a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at Binghamton in the summer of 2015. Kwan, then a student at Queensborough Community College, is now enrolled at Stony Brook University. Binghamton doctoral student Arwa Fraiwan also contributed to the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Paul Chiarot, who recently received a five-year, $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious program for early-career researchers, aims to redefine 3D printing at a very fine scale.

His “electrospray” technique puts tiny particles into a solvent and applies them to a surface, creating electronics in a process not unlike an inkjet printer. “The normal way we make things is we put material everywhere and then etch away what we don’t want,” Chiarot says. “You might end up etching away 90 or even 95 percent of the material. If you’re printing, you can just put the material where you want it to be.”

Chiarot says his work will build on existing research strengths at Binghamton. “What we’re trying to do is to control at the smallest length scales what the structure of an individual layer looks like,” he says. “Right now there’s not a lot of control for that. But if you want to be able to get really nice functionality out of a 3D printed part, you want to be able to control what we call structure at the smallest possible length scales.”

That sort of control will enable engineers to produce parts with specific mechanical, electrical, thermal and optical properties, Chiarot notes. Magnetic particles lined up a certain way could be useful for data storage. A thin layer of gold can be both transparent and conductive, which can be useful in solar cell development. Glass particles could be useful for coatings with anti-fogging or anti-frosting properties, too. His group also plans to work with graphene and other carbon-based materials with interesting electrical and thermal properties.

“If you imagine these particles were billiard balls that we just threw together — which is the way we do it now — and you wanted to pass electric current through that, if it’s randomly packed, it won’t do a great job of it,” Chiarot says. “But if we do it the way you line up billiard balls — in an orderly fashion — that should help us get better conductivity, a more efficient device or maybe one that requires less material.”

Chiarot, who received bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Toronto, was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Rochester before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2011. His current research is a natural evolution of his earlier projects, including work on electrosprays with biological applications and with Kodak on printing technology.

The electrospray system relies on a high-voltage power supply and a small pump, which delivers the material to a nozzle that looks more like a syringe. When the particles come out in the spray, they have a high electric charge, which keeps them apart. It’s like a cloud of solvent with the particles disbursed through it. Chiarot says secondary electric fields can be used to reposition them “in flight.”

The system can cover centimeters of material at a time, and Chiarot envisions having rows of nozzles side by side to scale up the process for manufacturing.

Flat plastic and glass substrates are the “workhorses” of his lab, but Chiarot is also interested in taking a plastic part from a 3D printer and using electrospray techniques to apply coatings onto objects that aren’t so flat or so regular.

The goal of this research is to make electrospray printing a true manufacturing tool, to take it beyond one-centimeter-square samples produced in laboratories or small pieces created as curiosities. “We want to understand this principle fundamentally,” Chiarot says, “and then, using that knowledge, we want to develop a manufacturing technique that can lead to new jobs.”

Customized, small batches of products could be made at a lower cost with 3D printing in the future, he says. And picture the possibilities of a 3D printer somewhere like the International Space Station!

Chiarot knows his technique will be more attractive to manufacturers if there are relatively few special requirements for it. Generally, he says, electrospray can be applied at room temperature with low humidity and clean (but not sterile) conditions.

And he does anticipate a day in the not-too-distant future when manufacturing returns to the United States in a big way. It won’t look like it did 50 years ago, Chiarot cautions: “We need things, both small and large, not just cell phones, but jet engines and replacement parts, too. Manufacturing positions will come back, but it won’t be an assembly line.”

He says he’s excited about preparing his students for that kind of work. Open-source technology for 3D printing has the potential to accelerate innovation, Chiarot says, and students need to be ready to take advantage of the possibilities.

His NSF CAREER award includes an educational component, not only for doctoral students, but also to support undergraduates in the summer. Chiarot will work with a University of Toronto colleague to help staff a summer science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) program for kids there. Two Binghamton students will go this summer. Eventually, Binghamton will launch its own program and Toronto students will come to New York to support it.

“I worked in that program as an undergraduate,” he says. “It’s one of the best jobs you can imagine, and what it encompasses is amazing. It’s good for both young students and for the college students, and I think it will be great to have a program here as well.”

Jeffrey Mativetsky, assistant professor of physics, will receive more than $525,000 over five years for the work, which is to begin in July 2016. His research centers on the relationships between nanoscale structure and electrical function in organic materials for solar cells and electronics.

“One of the main things holding back the use of solar cells is the cost associated with them,” he says. “Organic solar cells provide a pathway toward low-cost, clean energy. Organic materials open new possibilities because they are lightweight and mechanically flexible, making it possible, for example, to integrate them into curved surfaces.”

Organic materials can also be processed near room temperature, Mativetsky notes, which is another factor that makes them attractive for flexible electronics.

Mativetsky, who blends principles of physics, chemistry and engineering in his research, says he’s motivated by a desire to work on systems that are relevant to society. He’d like to see solar cells integrated into disaster relief tents, for instance.

In his laboratory, students work at a 16-foot-long, nitrogen-filled glovebox as vacuum pumps vibrate and several solutions swirl in vials on a countertop stir plate. The glovebox maintains an environment a bit above atmospheric pressure, with less than 1 part per million of oxygen and humidity. Mativetsky has two atomic force microscopes, and his team uses additional equipment at Binghamton’s Analytical and Diagnostics Laboratory.

Mativetsky received seed funding through Binghamton’s Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence program, which encourages work across multiple fields of inquiry and counts smart energy as a special area of interest. The preliminary results obtained by Mativetsky with fellow Binghamton physicist Joon Jang and chemist Alistair Lees provided a foundation for the NSF proposal. “We made it to the start line,” Mativetsky says. “Now we can do the research we set out to do.”

The core of that research will focus on molecule-based nanowires, filaments that are far, far thinner than a human hair and which often have special properties not found in materials at larger scales. Mativetsky is especially interested in how electric charge moves through these nanomaterials.

“We’re investigating the fundamentals of how nanoscale structuring affects charge photogeneration and charge transport,” he says.

Mativetsky believes these nanowires could improve organic solar cell performance and enable the manufacture of flexible solar cells that are thinner than a sheet of paper. Such solar cells might be less efficient than traditional ones made with silicon, he says, but they could produce more energy per gram of material.

Mativetsky, a native of Montreal who earned a doctorate in physics from McGill University in 2006, held post-doctoral fellowships at the Supramolecular Science and Engineering Institute in France and at Princeton University before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2012.

He is already the recipient of another $300,000 NSF grant, which supports research into graphene oxide with potential applications in flexible electronics, energy storage, sensors, composite materials and biomedical engineering.

Shawn Sallis wants to know why.

“It’s unclear what’s causing the problem,” says Sallis, a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering at Binghamton University. “The electrodes start as a powder, which is mixed with a liquid binder to create a paste. That makes it really hard to disentangle exactly what’s going on as the material starts to degrade, and it’s going to require a lot of work to find out.”

To solve the puzzle, Sallis is spending this school year on a prestigious fellowship at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, Calif., where he’ll be working with the Advanced Light Source (ALS), a synchrotron that produces a beam a billion times brighter the sun. By bombarding his materials with X-rays, Sallis can observe the electrons as the battery charges and recharges, and gain a better understanding how the surface and subsurface degrade.

“We need facilities like the one in Berkeley to answer why we’re not reaching the full potential of these materials,” says Louis Piper, an assistant professor of physics who serves as Sallis’ faculty advisor. “They’re not behaving as they should, and we suspect the differences between the surface and the interior of these nanoparticles that make the electrodes is responsible. If we can determine what’s occurring, then we can consider how to overcome the problem. Over the past few years, Shawn has gained a lot of experience, which makes him the natural candidate.”

Since coming to Binghamton in 2010, Sallis has co-authored 17 published papers, presented his work at five national conferences and won an award for Best Poster for the oxide semiconductors symposium at the fall 2012 Meeting of the Materials Research Society. He has already conducted research at ALS, as well as at the National Synchrotron Light Source on Long Island and at Diamond Light Source in the United Kingdom.

“It’s very expensive to make the kind of X-rays we need to do this work,” says Sallis, who grew up in rural Cortland County, the son of a nurse and a long-haul truck driver, before graduating from SUNY Cortland in 2010. “Improving batteries is going to be a long, hard process with a lot of incremental steps. So I’m really excited to go back to ALS, where I’ll be able to focus on my research, help other people with their experiments, and see a lot of science I wouldn’t find anywhere else in the world.”

Seokheun “Sean” Choi developed an inexpensive, bacteria-powered battery made from paper, he writes in the July edition of the journal Nano Energy.

The battery generates power from microbial respiration, delivering enough energy to run a paper-based biosensor with nothing more than a drop of bacteria-containing liquid. “Dirty water has a lot of organic matter,” Choi says. “Any type of organic material can be the source of bacteria for the bacterial metabolism.”

The method should be especially useful to anyone working in remote areas with limited resources. Indeed, because paper is inexpensive and readily available, many experts working on disease control and prevention have seized upon it as a key material in creating diagnostic tools for the developing world.

“Paper is cheap and it’s biodegradable,” Choi says. “And we don’t need external pumps or syringes because paper can suck up a solution using capillary force.”

While paper-based biosensors have shown promise in this area, the existing technology must be paired with hand-held devices for analysis. Choi says he envisions a self-powered system in which a paper-based battery would create enough energy — we’re talking microwatts — to run the biosensor. Creating such a system is the goal of a new three-year grant of nearly $300,000 he received from the National Science Foundation.

Choi’s battery, which folds into a square the size of a matchbook, uses an inexpensive air-breathing cathode created with nickel sprayed onto one side of ordinary office paper. The anode is screen printed with carbon paints, creating a hydrophilic zone with wax boundaries.

Total cost of this potentially game-changing device? Five cents.

Choi, who joined Binghamton’s faculty less than three years ago as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, earned a doctorate from Arizona State University after doing undergraduate work and a master’s degree in South Korea. Choi, who holds two U.S. patents, initially collaborated on the paper battery with Hankeun Lee, a former Binghamton undergraduate and co-author of the new journal article.

Choi recalls an actual “lightbulb moment” while working on an earlier iteration of the paper-based batteries, before he tried the origami approach. “I connected four of the devices in series, and I lit up this small LED,” he says. “At that moment, I knew I had done it!”

Now the winner of one of America’s most prestigious scholarships, Pereyra plans to spend the summer at the turbine’s base trying to model how waves, currents and water interfere with how wind is turned into energy.

Winning the Barry M. Goldwater scholarship, a $7,500 prize given to 260 undergraduate researchers, is nice, but just a mile marker on the road to something really big: efficient, affordable, green energy.

“We’re hoping to put wind turbines offshore,” said the 20-year-old Binghamton University undergraduate. “The big complication is that rather than a fixed base, it has multiple degrees of freedom.”

Turbine platforms face waves, current, storms and, naturally, the wind. All that can affect the power collected. And as farms crop up, the turbines themselves affect the wind flow to neighboring turbines.

Pereyra won the scholarship — a federal program that honors the late U.S. senator and fosters math, engineering and science advances — based on his academic record and a proposal to research and develop the computational modeling to make turbines more effective.

“I’ve really been pretty passionate about renewable energy since I got here,” said Pereyra, from Westhampton Beach, on Long Island. “I thought about where the problems lie for our society. We’re entirely run off fossil fuels. Why spend resources developing a technology our children are going to struggle to live without?”

His challenge is that much of the existing modeling for wind turbines comes from the offshore oil industry. But the two platforms are very different. Oil rigs are huge and can ignore some forces, higher order wave effects, for example, that would tear a turbine platform apart. Likewise, an oil rig’s size means it must deal with other forces small platforms overcome easily.

Pereyra began learning how to do that during a 2014 internship with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., studying how wind farms are affected, and affect, wind. He’ll continue that work this summer, again with the NREL, dealing with offshore platforms.

“We have to see how that applies to our technology. Sometimes it does; sometimes it doesn’t,” he said. The new models he hopes to develop would be both faster and more accurate.

Pereyra’s first steps in fluid dynamics and modeling came in the lab of Bruce Murray, a professor of mechanical engineering at Binghamton. While there, Pereyra exhibited one of the most crucial traits of a good researcher, Murray said: curiosity.

“He struggled, but he asked lots of questions and figured things out,” Murray said. “Some kids are really just sharp and motivated. And it’s very rare that students that new get into modeling to that extent.”

The industry has been shifting from open-air cooling of these facilities to increasingly complex systems that segregate hot air from cold air. When it comes to cost savings, there are definite advantages to the aisle containment systems, which have been estimated to save 30 percent of cooling energy — but it’s not yet clear how they increase the risk of overheating, or how to design them for greatest safety and optimum energy efficiency.

That’s what Husam Alissa, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering, is trying to determine at Binghamton University’s state-of-the-art Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2).

In a poster titled “Experimentally Guided Advances of Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling of Air-Cooled Data Centers in a Raised Floor Setting,” which won a contest at a recent meeting of ES2’s Industrial Advisory Board, Alissa lays the foundations for a systematic analysis of Binghamton’s new data center, using both empirical research and computer modeling.

“We included some guidelines for the initial characterization of data center facilities, such as air flow, turbulence, pressure, velocity, momentum and cooling capacity,” says Alissa, who began his work in heat and mass transfer as an undergrad at the Hashemite University in Jordan and a master’s student at Jordan University of Science and Technology. “There are certain things data center modelers seem to oversimplify, and in order to effectively reduce the energy cost, it is important to create accurate models.”

At a large data center, the cost savings could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, which is why the solution is so important to ES2, a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center. Partners in ES2 include Georgia Tech, the University of Texas at Arlington and Villanova University, along with Bloomberg, Comcast, Facebook, Future Facilities, IBM, Intel, NYSERDA and Verizon.

In 2013, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity — enough electricity to power all the households in New York City twice over, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. That figure is projected to reach 140 billion kilowatt-hours by 2020, dumping an electric bill of about $13 billion on American businesses.

During the next two years, Alissa expects to refine his analysis, cycling back and forth between data collection and computational fluid dynamics, validating his models along the way.

“Husam has done a very good job establishing a strong technical base for this research,” says IBM Senior Engineer Ken Schneebeli, who served as a mentor on the poster, along with ES2 director Bahgat Sammakia; Future Facilities’ Mark Seymour; IBM’s Roger Schmidt; and Villanova’s Alfonso Ortega. “This is a subject of critical business importance that has not yet been investigated at the university level or at the industry level, and Husam is establishing a basis to ably assert the accuracy of his modeling and methodologies. He has the patience, confidence and thoroughness to take on a project of this size.”

In a tiny lab tucked away in the basement of Science II, a team of graduate and undergraduate researchers is studying the properties of transparent conducting oxides (TCOs).

Typical transparent materials, such as glass and plastic, are not great conductors of electricity, yet TCOs are used in electronics such as phones and laptops. Zachary Lebens-Higgins, a senior physics major from Rochester, hopes that classifying TCOs by their physical properties will allow him to determine why they have conductive properties.

Developments in this field have already led to the creation of touch-screen technology that is used in phones and tablets, along with the solar cell. “My hope is that with our characterizations we will, down the road, better understand these systems and be able to make devices — in particular solar cells — cheaper and more sustainable,” Lebens-Higgins says.

Characterizing these materials is a very broad field to research, so the Binghamton team collaborates with several other labs around the world. “We are trying to create a cohesive story,” Lebens-Higgins says.

This multi-faceted approach includes working with University of College London, University of Bath and Cornell University. The Binghamton scientists conduct research on thin films created in a Cornell lab, and then compare their experimental findings to the theorists’ discoveries abroad, a holistic approach that sets this team apart from the others.

Louis Piper, Lebens-Higgins’ research adviser and an assistant professor of physics at Binghamton, helped nurture his thirst for knowledge. He chose Lebens-Higgins to accompany him to Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. There, the researchers used advanced spectroscopy technology to supplement their research at Binghamton.

“I usually only take undergraduates there if they have a very promising result,” says Piper, “and Zach’s been down there three times.”

Along with his research on campus, Lebens-Higgins was also selected to travel with a small group of students to Germany. He presented his research, but he says the best part was talking to scientists about their unique approaches to work toward the same goal.

In fact, Lebens-Higgins points to being able to understand the groundbreaking research others are doing as one of the most rewarding parts of his work. It wasn’t easy; he spent an entire summer learning and researching the physics of TCOs before he stepped foot in a lab.

Piper says Lebens-Higgins is a standout among his students, taking on a workload that rivals that of graduate researchers. This work ethic will aid Lebens-Higgins, who has been accepted to a summer undergraduate laboratory internship at Brookhaven to work on photocathode materials. Afterward, he plans to follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue a doctorate in physics.

“When the dean or provost says Binghamton is a center of undergraduate excellence,” Piper says, “it is students like Zach they are talking about.”