Dylan Richmond, a fourth-year doctoral student in the Materials Science and Engineering Program, conducts research focused on identifying innovative materials and processes to produce reliable, low-cost, low-waste flexible electronic devices. His research group prints and builds circuits onto adaptable plastic materials.

“My favorite part of this work is definitely printing the materials and making something go from a design to an actual circuit and then building upon that and making the whole device,” Richmond says.

He has worked with Binghamton’s Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing, or CAMM lab, for two and a half years. The laboratory is directed by Mark Poliks, a SUNY distinguished professor of systems science and industrial engineering. Richmond works alongside Poliks on several projects.

“Dylan is a highly motivated individual who is always willing to accept new and challenging responsibilities,” Poliks says. “It has been my privilege to see him develop into an independent professional scientist.”

The CAMM produces devices that are made to withstand high temperatures and large influxes of energy. They can flex onto virtually any curved surface seamlessly, all while adopting the flexibility of a Band-Aid.

In traditional electronics manufacturing, copper or another conductive metal coats the entire plate and excess materials are etched away to leave behind the circuit. However, the CAMM focuses on printing through additive manufacturing. This process reduces waste and is a cost-effective alternative.

“In additive manufacturing, you only print what you need,” Richmond says. “So you print just the design of the circuit.”

While growing up in Owego, Richmond favored the complex nature of math and science over all other elementary subjects. His initial curiosity and appreciation ultimately paved the way for his future as an engineer.

During his final year at SUNY Oswego, where he received his bachelor’s in physics, Richmond had an opportunity to conduct research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on perovskite solar cells. Perovskite is a low-cost, high-energy material that can be used to power electronic devices.

Flexible hybrid electronics combine printed electronic circuits and the flexibility of plastic materials with the efficiency of thinned semiconductor devices to produce a new form of electronics.

“Flexible electronics should be able to adapt to locations and environments where they are needed. The key word here is adapting,” Richmond says. “You want them to not be a nuisance to you. You want to barely notice that they’re on you. So the challenge is making them so thin, so light-weight, so that you barely notice that you’re wearing them and they’re not getting in the way of your daily activities.”

Printed electronics are still novel and fundamental work still needs to be done. As the field of materials science gains more traction, Richmond says that he is less interested in competition and more interested in sharing his knowledge with like-minded peers in the engineering community.

“There’s a lot of people that are interested in this right now, and I just want to contribute to it,” he says.

The influence of the Green Revolution has motivated Richmond to hope for a future in the renewable energy sector. He aspires to combine his knowledge and experience in materials science with his passion for printing and green energy, to create his own renewable energy company in the future.

“Many of our projects involve collaboration with colleagues at major corporations and other universities,” Poliks says. “Dylan has had the opportunity to develop the skills needed to work in a complex team environment. As a result he is now well prepared to work in a highly competitive research and development laboratory.”

“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.

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.”

Binghamton University chemist Nikolay Dimitrov imagines all of these things, and because of that they may someday be a reality for the rest of us. Dimitrov uses his expertise in electrochemistry, analytical chemistry and materials science to develop catalysts that he hopes will be sturdier and cheaper than existing options.

Take the lithium ion battery. This workhorse of the tech world powers products ranging from cell phones to electric vehicles. But it has basic limitations: Its capacity decreases so fast that even the best smartphones lose their juice in two days; its energy density pales in comparison to gasoline; and overcharging can lead to instability and, in the worst cases, fires.

One future alternative is the lithium oxygen (air) battery. Dimitrov estimates that, once developed, the lithium oxygen battery will store 10 times the energy of a similar-sized lithium ion.

Dimitrov contributes to that future by developing the fundamental catalysts from which those batteries (and many other things) could someday be built.

A paper he co-authored in Nature in 2001, which first introduced to a broader audience de-alloying, a key process to his approach, has been cited more than 1,000 times. Dimitrov, an associate professor of chemistry and materials science, has brought $1.5 million dollars in research funding to Binghamton since joining the faculty a decade ago. His National Science Foundation support includes a $300,000 award this year and a 2008 CAREER Award. (That’s the most prestigious federal grant for young faculty.)

“The NSF wants to make sure that we can control key fundamental aspects of this process so we can move to practical application in a more confident way,” Dimitrov said.

Most catalysts are now made using nanoparticles. They’re handy and versatile little objects, but controlling them is difficult and results in substantial losses.

Dimitrov’s method, on the other hand, involves electrochemically depositing an alloy of readily mixed metals, such as silver and gold, then selectively removing the less noble one (in that case, silver), to leave a noble, three-dimensional porous structure that’s ultra-thin, uniform and beautifully interconnected. This structure can then be customized with a variety of coatings with specific catalytic activity.

“We control the current, and by running it for a specific time, we get a charge that accounts for every atom deposited on the surface,” Dimitrov said.

Radoslav Adzic, a senior chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and leading researcher in fuel cell catalysis, says Dimitrov’s work on fundamental questions in electrochemistry has made significant contributions to their field.

“His recent work developing catalysts for energy applications is the subject of enormous importance for achieving goals of clean energy and a clean environment,” Adzic said. “His methodical approach and ability to identify key issues produces publications that will help in reaching these goals in the near future.”

Aleksey Kolmogorov, assistant professor of physics at Binghamton, proposed the new superconductor in Physical Review Letters in 2010 and then teamed up with leading experimental groups in Germany, Belgium, Italy and France to test the prediction.

The synthesized material — a novel iron tetraboride compound — is made out of two common elements, has a brand-new crystal structure and exhibits an unexpected type of superconductivity for a material that contains iron, just as predicted in the original computational study.

“Paradigm-shifting superconducting materials have so far been discovered experimentally, and oftentimes accidentally,” Kolmogorov says.

Until now, theory has been used primarily to investigate superconducting mechanisms and, in rare cases, suggest ways that existing materials might be modified to become superconductors. But many proposed superconducting materials are not stable enough to form and those that do form are poor superconductors.

Superconductors, which conduct electric current without any resistance when cooled below a certain temperature, have many interesting applications. For instance, power lines made out of superconducting materials can significantly reduce the energy lost in transmission. Superconducting magnets are also used in high-speed levitating trains and could improve wind turbines.

The phenomenon of superconductivity was discovered more than 100 years ago, with breakthroughs in the 1960s bringing it into practical application in a variety of technologies. The critical temperature, or Tc, for superconductors discovered to date is between 0 and 136 Kelvin (-460 and -214 degrees Fahrenheit). This means that most superconductors require expensive cooling mechanisms. Scientists are still searching for new materials that are superconductors at higher temperatures and can be mass produced.

More than five years ago, Kolmogorov, then at Oxford University, began studying boron-based materials, which have remarkably complex structures and a wide range of applications. He developed an automated computational tool to identify previously unknown stable crystal structures without any input from experiment. His “evolutionary” algorithm emulates nature, meaning it favors more stable materials among thousands of possibilities. (Kolmogorov is a computational physicist, but he also dreams of holding a compound in his hands that he predicted in silico.)

The search revealed two promising compounds in a common iron-boron system, which came as a surprise. Moreover, graduate student Sheena Shah’s calculations indicated that one of them should be a superconductor at an unusually high temperature of 15-20 Kelvin for the considered (so-called “conventional”) type of superconductivity.

Months of double-checking confirmed the preliminary results on the stability and superconductivity of the compound. Still, the 2010 theoretical discovery was met with skepticism.

Natalia Dubrovinskaia and Leonid Dubrovinsky, professors at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, undertook a year-long series of challenging high-pressure experiments and produced a very small quantity of iron tetraboride in the predicted crystal structure, leading to the most recent journal article. Detailed measurements also demonstrated the material’s predicted superconducting property and, unexpectedly, its exceptional hardness.

“The discovery of this superhard superconductor demonstrates that new compounds can be brought into existence by revisiting seemingly well-studied systems,” Kolmogorov says. Now that this material has been synthesized, it may be possible to modify it and raise the temperature at which it becomes a superconductor.

Next, Kolmogorov plans to turn his attention to metal oxides. “They are fascinating because they have applications as catalysts, photovoltaic materials and protective coatings,” he says. “We hope our predictive methodology will lead to more exciting discoveries.”

A native of sun-drenched southern India, where daily high temperatures often exceed 100 degrees, discovers that one of the best places to pursue his interest in solar energy is an upstate New York community noted for its cloud cover.

“Since childhood, I have been interested in energy sources that are nonpolluting and are abundant,” says Siva P. Adusumilli, who received his bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University. “I did some homework, and I found out about Binghamton University’s Center for Autonomous Solar Power.”

Now Adusumilli is a doctoral student at Binghamton while working as a graduate research associate at the center known as CASP. His focus is on earth-abundant solar materials and nanomaterials.

Some substances, such as silicon, are well-suited for use in solar cells but are costly to process and, therefore, drive up the price of the end product. That limits the cells’ potential for wide usage even though the energy source — the sun — is free, Adusumilli says. He also points out the illogic of having to use great quantities of energy to synthesize materials to be used in products designed to produce or save energy. Research in earth-abundant materials, which are relatively much cheaper, is a growing field.

Adusumilli’s work has been in the synthesis of two such substances for use in thin-film solar cells: iron pyrite (aka “fool’s gold”) and zinc phosphide. Charles R. Westgate, director of CASP, says Adusumilli has won numerous student poster contests and drawn attention from colleagues at prestigious universities for his findings. “He has been successful in achieving high-quality films and nanomaterials like carbon nanotubes and is now optimizing their growth for solar cells,” Westgate says.

Unless the price of raw materials drops, solar energy will not be an appealing option for homeowners, Adusumilli says. “When people put in a solar roof, they think, ‘How long is the payback?’ and, if it’s 20 years …” he says, trailing off with a knowing shrug.

Much of CASP’s funding comes from government agencies, but the center “tries to have communication with industry. Companies like IBM and GE — they know what is needed,” says Adusumilli, who sees himself as a research scientist with a U.S. company after graduation. “Since my childhood, I’ve had the image of me in a research lab coat.”