Pawliczak, a mechanical engineering doctoral student at Binghamton University, has won several prizes, most recently in October, when she received the Best Student Poster Award during the 56th International Symposium on Microelectronics, held by the International Microelectronics Assembly & Packaging Society in San Diego.

Pawliczak’s research involves electrospray technology — employing electricity to disperse a liquid or fine aerosol — to create a thin (as in nanoparticle thin) film for electromagnetic interference (EMI) protection in electronics manufacturing. The silver film provides a low-cost, space-conscious way to protect against EMI.

“There is a push in the industry to miniaturize devices, from cell phones to hearing aids, so it’s important to maximize the available internal space,” Pawliczak says. “The idea is that electrospray will open the doors for many different applications of this technology.”

Pawliczak conducts her work in the Microfluidics and Multiphase Flow Laboratory of Paul R. Chiarot, professor and chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. This research was a new direction for Chiarot’s group when the Semiconductor Research Corp., a research consortium that promotes collaborations among academic institutions, technology companies and government agencies, presented the research opportunity in 2020.

“Emma took on this project and ran with it, and at this point now has complete ownership of it,” Chiarot says. “She directs it herself, interacts with company liaisons at Texas Instruments, NXP Semiconductors and Intel, and she’s gone on to make great contributions in this space. She is a very careful and thoughtful scientist.”

The New Hampton, N.Y., resident knew from an early age that she wanted to pursue mechanical engineering. “I watched my father bring home drawings and documents throughout my life, coming up with creative solutions to complex problems,” she says. “Instead of looking at obstacles as work, he looked at them like puzzles. So I wanted to be like my dad. I thought I was going to go into construction, but now I work on a much different size scale, in the micro and nano range.”

It was an easy decision to attend Binghamton when she first toured the campus as a high school junior. “It was an immediate connection. I loved the energy of the campus,” she says. “As soon as I got my early action acceptance letter, I confirmed my enrollment the same day.”

Pawliczak received her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Binghamton in 2020 and then stayed to continue her graduate studies. Her career, so far, includes three peer-reviewed journal publications and seven conference paper publications. She has given more than 20 conference talks and poster presentations across the country.

She hopes to complete her doctorate in 2025.

“I will be interning at Intel this summer and I am extremely excited for the experience,” Pawliczak says. “I often go back and forth between entering industry or pursuing a career in academia, but I look forward to any and all paths my degree may lead me.”

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.”

Funded by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that supports interdisciplinary undergraduate research, Irwin worked on a pair of related experiments with Paul Chiarot, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Jeffrey Schertzer, an assistant professor of biological sciences. In the first, Schertzer studied how vesicles — small bubbles within a cell, enclosed by lipids — affect communication within a bacterial community; in the second, he examined the ways shear stress affects the growth of biofilms.

“What’s unique about this collaboration is that Rebecca’s device allows Jeff to grow biofilms in situ, to add stress in a controllable way, and to observe the structure of the biofilms, which are actually quite complex,” says Chiarot, who supervised Irwin’s work in designing and building the instruments. “Rebecca took leadership on this project, which requires a lot of initiative and a lot of independence. That would have been challenging for a graduate student, and for an undergraduate, it’s even more impressive.”

With biofilms all around us — between our teeth, in the slime on a rock, inside a medical implant — there’s hope this research will reveal what does and doesn’t make them grow, which would have medical, biological and environmental applications. By learning how to disrupt their growth, scientists can decrease the risk of infection; by learning how to increase their growth, they can create new industrial cleaning agents to reduce pollution.

Both are part of the motivation that drives Irwin, a 2015 graduate who plans to pursue a doctorate in bioengineering, and whose participation on these projects was a life-changing experience. “As an undergraduate, being able to do research at this level is really cool,” she says. “It’s different from being in a lab as part of a class, where there’s a desired outcome that your professor wants you to have.”

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.”

The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could be relevant to understanding and perhaps controlling oxidation in a range of materials — from catalysts to the superalloys used in jet engine turbines and the oxides in microelectronics.

The experiments were performed by a team led by Guangwen Zhou, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Binghamton University, in collaboration with Peter Sutter of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The team used a low-energy electron microscope (LEEM) to capture changes in the surface structure of a nickel-aluminum alloy as “stripes” of metal oxide formed and grew under a range of elevated temperatures.

The metal Zhou wanted to study, nickel-aluminum, has a characteristic common to all crystal surfaces: a stepped structure composed of a series of flat terraces at different heights. The steps between terraces are only one atom high, but they can have a significant effect on material properties. Being able to see the steps and how they change is essential to understanding how the surface will behave in different environments, in this case in response to oxygen, Sutter said.

Said Zhou, “The acquisition of this kind of knowledge is essential for gaining control over the response of a metal surface to the environment.”

Scientists have known for a while that the atoms at the edges of atomic steps are especially reactive. “They are not as completely surrounded as the atoms that are part of the flat terraces, so they are more free to interact with the environment,” Sutter said. “That plays a role in the material’s surface chemistry.”

The new study, supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science, showed that the aluminum atoms involved in forming aluminum oxide stripes came exclusively from the steps, not the terraces. But the LEEM images revealed even more: The growing oxide stripes could not “climb” up or down the steps, but were confined to the flat terraces. To continue to grow, they had to push the steps away as oxygen continued to grab aluminum atoms from the edges. This forced the steps to bunch closer and closer together, eventually slowing the rate of oxide stripe growth, and then completely stopping it.

“For the first time we show that atomic steps can slow surface oxidation at the earliest stages,” Zhou said.

However, as one stripe stops growing, another begins to form. “As the oxide stripes grow along the two possible directions on the crystal, which are at right angles to one another, one ends up with these patterns of blocks and lines that are reminiscent of the grid-based paintings by Mondrian,” Sutter said. “They are quite beautiful” and persistent after all.

Still the details and differences of the two types of surfaces could offer new ways scientists might attempt to control oxidation depending on their purpose.

“Oxides are not all bad,” Sutter said. “They form as a protective layer against corrosion attack. They play important roles in chemistry, for example in catalysis. Silicon oxide is the insulating material on microelectronic circuits, where it plays a central role in directing the flow of current.”

Knowing which kind of surface a material has and its effects on oxidation — or how to engineer surfaces with desired properties — might improve the design of these and other materials.

A doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering, Song studies data centers — the nervous systems of our digital lives — and ways to cool them more efficiently.

“I like computers, math and engineering, but it’s not just about technology. It’s more about people,” Song says. “It’s the demand of people who are used to this digital life today that drives the need for the growth of data centers.”

As indispensable as they are, data centers can also be energy hogs. The tens of thousands of data centers across the country used roughly 76 billion kilowatt-hours of energy in 2010, or about 2 percent of the nation’s entire electricity consumption, according to the New York Times. Much of that energy goes into cooling, or thermal management. The processors in a data center emit heat, and overheating can lead to slower processing or even system failure.

Song’s research is part of a growing effort looking at how companies can save money and energy by cooling their data centers more efficiently.

Right now, the standard method used to control energy usage in data centers involves using large-scale computational modeling and costly measurements of the temperatures throughout the data center for specific room configurations. It’s a precise method, but processing all the information and making changes to improve cooling performance can take hours or even days.

Song thinks that’s too long, especially when changes in temperature can mean drastic changes in cost. If a company can maintain healthy operating conditions in its data center, it won’t need to spend as much cooling down overheated processors. If companies can raise the temperature of the cool air they send into data centers by just four degrees Celsius (from 18 to 22 degrees), they use on average 30 percent less energy per minute.

Song is working on a greener solution, which combines smarter scientific modeling, simpler measurement requirements and much, much faster monitoring — so that cooling needs can be diagnosed and adjusted within minutes, rather than days.

The trick, Song thinks, is to develop a smart compact model that can not only provide more effective guidance to heat sensors setup, but can also learn from them via real-time feedback and predict the stuff that cannot be measured.

Because of the wide range of data center configurations and sizes, there is no one-size-fits-all model for thermal management, notes Bruce Murray, professor of mechanical engineering and Song’s advisor.

“Song has shown a lot of initiatives to develop a broad spectrum of compact models,” Murray said. “He’s already published four peer-reviewed journal articles.”

Zhou’s work focuses on numerical simulations of electronic packaging and thermal management. She aims to develop a numerical, multiphysics approach to mitigate fluid and thermal issues for microprocessors. Zhou also studies emerging energy-conversion devices.

High-density electronic devices have caused a sharp increase in heat-removal requirements, she notes, and traditional cooling methods can’t meet this need. The search for alternative methods leads in turn to challenges in electronics packaging and microprocessor cooling. “My work is focused on liquid-cooled microchannel heat sinks, which offer a new way to keep chips in high-performance computers from overheating,” says Zhou, who has validated her model with prior experimental data. “I hope I can provide some guidelines for real practice.”

Another aspect of her work centers on thermoelectric generators, which convert thermal energy into electric power. The current efficiency of such generators is around 5 percent. Zhou thinks her work could increase that to 7 or 8 percent.

“It has lots of applications, like in spacecraft, where energy from the natural decay of plutonium could generate power,” she says. “It also could change vehicles, where the temperature difference between exhaust and coolant could be used to turn waste heat energy into electric power.”

Zhou earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China before deciding to pursue further graduate work in the United States. She expects to defend her dissertation in mechanical engineering this year and hopes to go to work in U.S. industry after graduation.

Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research at Binghamton and director of the Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging Center, has mentored Zhou. “When I give her a research assignment,” he says, “she surprises me with her ideas and things she has discovered on her own. She has solved some really difficult problems related to electrical and mechanical engineering and fluid dynamics. She’s absolutely brilliant.”

Technology for the hearing-impaired is hardly perfect. The small microphones contained within hearing aids do a good job of boosting volume, but that can be a problem in a noisy restaurant as background sounds get boosted as much as your dinner date’s conversation. Miles used a tiny structure found in the ear of a fly, Ormia ochracea, as a model to develop the world’s smallest directional microphones.

His research received several million dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health nearly a decade ago, but that money was focused on scientific discovery and not on the development of a commercial product. Last year, the Research Foundation for the State University of New York (RF) supported development of the technology with $50,000 from the SUNY Technology Accelerator Fund (TAF). Now, Miles has earned an additional $100,000 from the fund to develop his microphone in a market-strategic way. Binghamton University will match that $100,000, providing additional resources to advance this research.

“As part of the review process, the RF team did a marketing study to determine potential markets for licensing and commercialization,” Miles says. “We ended up modifying our design to improve the marketability of our technology. By using a more conventional sensing scheme, it should be easier to commercialize.”

“Dr. Miles’ work is a perfect example of the real-world impact of SUNY research,” says Timothy Killeen, president of the RF and SUNY vice chancellor for research. “Ground-breaking research is being conducted by SUNY faculty and students across New York State. Our job is to provide the support that facilitates the advancement of invention to produce commercially viable technologies that serve the public good and trigger entrepreneurial and economic opportunity. Congratulations to Dr. Miles and his Binghamton University team.”

The Research Foundation launched the TAF in April 2011 to support innovation across the SUNY research community and to provide proof-of-concept funding for SUNY’s most promising technologies. In its first year, the fund produced two licensing agreements and three startup companies.

The TAF also recently announced first-round funding for an additional six projects proposed by SUNY researchers. Proposals were evaluated by the TAF managing director with input from external experts. The technologies selected include advancements in areas ranging from antibiotics to suicide prevention. Binghamton University bioengineer Kenneth McLeod had one of the winning proposals, with a plan to develop a personalized heating system that is designed to save energy while allowing people to manage their weight by maintaining a consistent body heat balance.

“Smart” micro-environmental systems keep employees in heat balance in the typical office environment. An infra-red based system heats people inside rooms in a building rather than blindly heating all spaces equally, whether occupied or not. Individuals obtain the comfort level they desire, resulting in improved productivity and decreased building operational costs. This “green” technology would reduce the energy needed to operate buildings, which accounts for 45 percent of all energy use in the U.S.

An equally important aspect of “radiant people heating” is that it triggers weight loss, McLeod says. This secondary benefit may provide even larger economic benefits to employers, employees and society. Building operators, engineers and architects can deploy micro-environmental control technology systematically to increase the economic and energy sustainability of their projects — and keeping people in buildings both comfortable and healthy.

She works on simulations of advanced cooling solutions for high-powered microelectronic devices. If that sounds a tad abstract, consider that everything from your cell phone to your car relies on microprocessors, which generate tremendous heat as they work. Better cooling will ultimately mean better performance and even smaller devices.

Chauhan, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering, studied metallurgy as an undergraduate in India. An interest in electronics packaging research brought her to Binghamton.

“Most people don’t know how electronics work,” she says.  “I’ve become excited by learning more and more about them. It’s amazing to see what goes inside a chip.”

Chauhan studies with Kanad Ghose, professor of computer science, and Bahgat Sammakia, director of Binghamton’s Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging Center and interim vice president for research. They have an interdisciplinary group focused on different aspects of chip-cooling research.

Chauhan is studying new three-dimensional chip designs that can operate at high speeds for applications that require the highest performance.

“Such designs are difficult to manage from a thermal perspective since they dissipate very high power and are also packaged compactly,” Sammakia says.  “In some cases the only way to cool them is to use liquid cooling in tiny micro channels that circulate cold water right in the middle of the devices.”

Chauhan, who has already earned a master’s degree from Binghamton and published a couple of papers, expects to go into industry after completing her degree. She says she likes the idea that she’s contributing at the  “ground level”  to ideas that may reach the marketplace in the next 10 years.

“It feels good to be doing something new, something that no one else is doing,”  she says.  “It’s creative. The electronics industry is looking for cooling solutions for high-powered electronic devices, and that’s where my research can play a distinctive role.”