Tag Archives: Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Let’s make our turbine blades really big (greater than 75 metres) with new nanocomposite

Leave a reply

The is a story about balsa wood, wind farms, turbine blades, and nanocomposites according to a June 25, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily,

In wind farms across North America and Europe, sleek turbines equipped with state-of-the-art technology convert wind energy into electric power. But tucked inside the blades of these feats of modern engineering is a decidedly low-tech core material: balsa wood.

Like other manufactured products that use sandwich panel construction to achieve a combination of light weight and strength, turbine blades contain carefully arrayed strips of balsa wood from Ecuador, which provides 95 percent of the world’s supply.

For centuries, the fast-growing balsa tree has been prized for its light weight and stiffness relative to density. But balsa wood is expensive and natural variations in the grain can be an impediment to achieving the increasingly precise performance requirements of turbine blades and other sophisticated applications.

As turbine makers produce ever-larger blades — the longest now measure 75 meters, almost matching the wingspan of an Airbus A380 jetliner — they must be engineered to operate virtually maintenance-free for decades. In order to meet more demanding specifications for precision, weight, and quality consistency, manufacturers are searching for new sandwich construction material options.

Now, using a cocktail of fiber-reinforced epoxy-based thermosetting resins and 3D extrusion printing techniques, materials scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed cellular composite materials of unprecedented light weight and stiffness.

A June 25, 2014 Harvard University news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, goes on to describe the new technology in more detail while throwing 3D printing into the mix,

Until now, 3D printing has been developed for thermo plastics and UV-curable resins—materials that are not typically considered as engineering solutions for structural applications. “By moving into new classes of materials like epoxies, we open up new avenues for using 3D printing to construct lightweight architectures,” says principal investigator Jennifer A. Lewis, the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard SEAS. “Essentially, we are broadening the materials palate for 3D printing.”

“Balsa wood has a cellular architecture that minimizes its weight since most of the space is empty and only the cell walls carry the load. It therefore has a high specific stiffness and strength,” explains Lewis, who in addition to her role at Harvard SEAS is also a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute. “We’ve borrowed this design concept and mimicked it in an engineered composite.”

Lewis and Brett G. Compton, a former postdoctoral fellow in her group, developed inks of epoxy resins, spiked with viscosity-enhancing nanoclay platelets and a compound called dimethyl methylphosphonate, and then added two types of fillers: tiny silicon carbide “whiskers” and discrete carbon fibers. Key to the versatility of the resulting fiber-filled inks is the ability to control the orientation of the fillers.

The direction that the fillers are deposited controls the strength of the materials (think of the ease of splitting a piece of firewood lengthwise versus the relative difficulty of chopping on the perpendicular against the grain).

Lewis and Compton have shown that their technique yields cellular composites that are as stiff as wood, 10 to 20 times stiffer than commercial 3D-printed polymers, and twice as strong as the best printed polymer composites. The ability to control the alignment of the fillers means that fabricators can digitally integrate the composition, stiffness, and toughness of an object with its design.

“This paper demonstrates, for the first time, 3D printing of honeycombs with fiber-reinforced cell walls,” said Lorna Gibson, a professor of materials science and mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of world’s leading experts in cellular composites, who was not involved in this research. “Of particular significance is the way that the fibers can be aligned, through control of the fiber aspect ratio—the length relative to the diameter—and the nozzle diameter. This marks an important step forward in designing engineering materials that mimic wood, long known for its remarkable mechanical properties for its weight.”

“As we gain additional levels of control in filler alignment and learn how to better integrate that orientation into component design, we can further optimize component design and improve materials efficiency,” adds Compton, who is now a staff scientist in additive manufacturing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “Eventually, we will be able to use 3D printing technology to change the degree of fiber filler alignment and local composition on the fly.”

The work could have applications in many fields, including the automotive industry where lighter materials hold the key to achieving aggressive government-mandated fuel economy standards. According to one estimate, shedding 110 pounds from each of the 1 billion cars on the road worldwide could produce $40 billion in annual fuel savings.

3D printing has the potential to radically change manufacturing in other ways too. Lewis says the next step will be to test the use of thermosetting resins to create different kinds of architectures, especially by exploiting the technique of blending fillers and precisely aligning them. This could lead to advances not only in structural materials, but also in conductive composites.

Previously, Lewis has conducted groundbreaking research in the 3D printing of tissue constructs with vasculature and lithium-ion microbatteries.

Here’s a link to and citation for the paper,

3D-Printing of Lightweight Cellular Composites by Brett G. Compton and Jennifer A. Lewis. Advanced Materials DOI: 10.1002/adma.201401804 Article first published online: 18 JUN 2014

© 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.

US Air Force wants to merge classical and quantum physics

Leave a reply

The US Air Force wants to merge classical and quantum physics for practical purposes according to a May 5, 2014 news item on Azonano,

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has selected the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) to lead a multidisciplinary effort that will merge research in classical and quantum physics and accelerate the development of advanced optical technologies.

Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering, will lead this Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative [MURI] with a world-class team of collaborators from Harvard, Columbia University, Purdue University, Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Lund University, and the University of Southampton.

The grant is expected to advance physics and materials science in directions that could lead to very sophisticated lenses, communication technologies, quantum information devices, and imaging technologies.

“This is one of the world’s strongest possible teams,” said Capasso. “I am proud to lead this group of people, who are internationally renowned experts in their fields, and I believe we can really break new ground.”

A May 1, 2014 Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences news release, which originated the news item, provides a description of project focus: nanophotonics and metamaterials along with some details of Capasso’s work in these areas (Note: Links have been removed),

The premise of nanophotonics is that light can interact with matter in unusual ways when the material incorporates tiny metallic or dielectric features that are separated by a distance shorter than the wavelength of the light. Metamaterials are engineered materials that exploit these phenomena, producing strange effects, enabling light to bend unnaturally, twist into a vortex, or disappear entirely. Yet the fabrication of thick, or bulk, metamaterials—that manipulate light as it passes through the material—has proven very challenging.

Recent research by Capasso and others in the field has demonstrated that with the right device structure, the critical manipulations can actually be confined to the very surface of the material—what they have dubbed a “metasurface.” These metasurfaces can impart an instantaneous shift in the phase, amplitude, and polarization of light, effectively controlling optical properties on demand. Importantly, they can be created in the lab using fairly common fabrication techniques.

At Harvard, the research has produced devices like an extremely thin, flat lens, and a material that absorbs 99.75% of infrared light. But, so far, such devices have been built to order—brilliantly suited to a single task, but not tunable.

This project, however,is focused on the future (Note: Links have been removed),

“Can we make a rapidly configurable metasurface so that we can change it in real time and quickly? That’s really a visionary frontier,” said Capasso. “We want to go all the way from the fundamental physics to the material building blocks and then the actual devices, to arrive at some sort of system demonstration.”

The proposed research also goes further. A key thrust of the project involves combining nanophotonics with research in quantum photonics. By exploiting the quantum effects of luminescent atomic impurities in diamond, for example, physicists and engineers have shown that light can be captured, stored, manipulated, and emitted as a controlled stream of single photons. These types of devices are essential building blocks for the realization of secure quantum communication systems and quantum computers. By coupling these quantum systems with metasurfaces—creating so-called quantum metasurfaces—the team believes it is possible to achieve an unprecedented level of control over the emission of photons.

“Just 20 years ago, the notion that photons could be manipulated at the subwavelength scale was thought to be some exotic thing, far fetched and of very limited use,” said Capasso. “But basic research opens up new avenues. In hindsight we know that new discoveries tend to lead to other technology developments in unexpected ways.”

The research team includes experts in theoretical physics, metamaterials, nanophotonic circuitry, quantum devices, plasmonics, nanofabrication, and computational modeling. Co-principal investigator Marko Lončar is the Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard SEAS. Co-PI Nanfang Yu, Ph.D. ’09, developed expertise in metasurfaces as a student in Capasso’s Harvard laboratory; he is now an assistant professor of applied physics at Columbia. Additional co-PIs include Alexandra Boltasseva and Vladimir Shalaev at Purdue, Mark Brongersma at Stanford, and Nader Engheta at the University of Pennsylvania. Lars Samuelson (Lund University) and Nikolay Zheludev (University of Southampton) will also participate.

The bulk of the funding will support talented graduate students at the lead institutions.

The project, titled “Active Metasurfaces for Advanced Wavefront Engineering and Waveguiding,” is among 24 planned MURI awards selected from 361 white papers and 88 detailed proposals evaluated by a panel of experts; each award is subject to successful negotiation. The anticipated amount of the Harvard-led grant is up to $6.5 million for three to five years.

For anyone who’s not familiar (that includes me, anyway) with MURI awards, there’s this from Wikipedia (Note: links have been removed),

Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) is a basic research program sponsored by the US Department of Defense (DoD). Currently each MURI award is about $1.5 million a year for five years.

I gather that in addition to the Air Force, the Army and the Navy also award MURI funds.

Mesenchymal condensation (a process embryos use to begin forming a variety of organs, including teeth, cartilage, bone, muscle, tendon, and kidney) for complex 3D tissue engineering

Leave a reply

It seems that there are three strategies for creating complex 3D tissues and until now scientists have used only two of the three. From a March 5, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily,

A bit of pressure from a new shrinking, sponge-like gel is all it takes to turn transplanted unspecialized cells into cells that lay down minerals and begin to form teeth.

The bioinspired gel material could one day help repair or replace damaged organs, such as teeth and bone, and possibly other organs as well, scientists from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Boston Children’s Hospital report recently in Advanced Materials.

“Tissue engineers have long raised the idea of using synthetic materials to mimic the inductive power of the embryo,” said Don Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., Founding Director of the Wyss Institute, …, Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS, and senior author of the study. “We’re excited about this work because it shows that it really is possible.”

The March 5, 2014 Wyss Institute news release, which originated the news item, delves into the nature of the research,

Embryonic tissues have the power to drive cells and tissues to specialize and form organs. To do that, they employ biomolecules called growth factors to stimulate growth; gene-activating chemicals that cause the cells to specialize, and mechanical forces that modulate cell responses to these other factors.

But so far tissue engineers who want to build organs in the laboratory have employed only two of the three strategies — growth factors and gene-activating chemicals. Perhaps as a result, they have not yet succeeded in producing complex three-dimensional tissues.

A few years ago, Ingber and Tadanori Mammoto, M.D., Ph.D., Instructor in Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, investigated a process called mesenchymal condensation that embryos use to begin forming a variety of organs, including teeth, cartilage, bone, muscle, tendon, and kidney.

In mesenchymal condensation, two adjacent tissue layers — loosely packed connective-tissue cells called mesenchyme and sheet-like tissue called an epithelium that covers it — exchange biochemical signals. This exchange causes the mesenchymal cells to squeeze themselves tightly into a small knot directly below where the new organ will form.

Here’s a video from the Wyss Institute illustrating the squeezing process,

When the temperature rises to just below body temperature, this biocompatible gel shrinks dramatically within minutes, bringing tooth-precursor cells (green) closer together. Credit: Basma Hashmi

Getting back to the research (from the news release),

By examining tissues isolated from the jaws of embryonic mice, Mammoto and Ingber showed that when the compressed mesenchymal cells turn on genes that stimulate them to generate whole teeth composed of mineralized tissues, including dentin and enamel.

Inspired by this embryonic induction mechanism, Ingber and Basma Hashmi, a Ph.D. candidate at SEAS who is the lead author of the current paper, set out to develop a way to engineer artificial teeth by creating a tissue-friendly material that accomplishes the same goal. Specifically, they wanted a porous sponge-like gel that could be impregnated with mesenchymal cells, then, when implanted into the body, induced to shrink in 3D to physically compact the cells inside it.

To develop such a material, Ingber and Hashmi teamed up with researchers led by Joanna Aizenberg, Ph.D., a Wyss Institute Core Faculty member who leads the Institute’s Adaptive Materials Technologies platform. Aizenberg is the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at SEAS and Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University.

They chemically modified a special gel-forming polymer called PNIPAAm that scientists have used to deliver drugs to the body’s tissues. PNIPAAm gels have an unusual property: they contract abruptly when they warm.

But they do this at a lukewarm temperature, whereas the researchers wanted them to shrink specifically at 37°C — body temperature — so that they’d squeeze their contents as soon as they were injected into the body. Hashmi worked with Lauren Zarzar, Ph.D., a former SEAS graduate student who’s now a postdoctoral associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for more than a year, modifying PNIPAAm and testing the resulting materials. Ultimately, they developed a polymer that forms a tissue-friendly gel with two key properties: cells stick to it, and it compresses abruptly when warmed to body temperature.

As an initial test, Hashmi implanted mesenchymal cells in the gel and warmed it in the lab. Sure enough, when the temperature reached 37°C, the gel shrank within 15 minutes, causing the cells inside the gel to round up, shrink, and pack tightly together.

“The reason that’s cool is that the cells are alive,” Hashmi said. “Usually when this happens, cells are dead or dying.”

Not only were they alive — they activated three genes that drive tooth formation.

To see if the shrinking gel also worked its magic in the body, Hashmi worked with Mammoto to load mesenchymal cells into the gel, then implant the gel beneath the mouse kidney capsule — a tissue that is well supplied with blood and often used for transplantation experiments.

The implanted cells not only expressed tooth-development genes — they laid down calcium and minerals, just as mesenchymal cells do in the body as they begin to form teeth.

“They were in full-throttle tooth-development mode,” Hashmi said.

The researchers have future plans (from the news release),

In the embryo, mesenchymal cells can’t build teeth alone — they need to be combined with cells that form the epithelium. In the future, the scientists plan to test whether the shrinking gel can stimulate both tissues to generate an entire functional tooth.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper about the successful attempt to stimulate mesenchymal cells into the beginnings of tooth formation,

Developmentally-Inspired Shrink-Wrap Polymers for Mechanical Induction of Tissue Differentiation by Basma Hashmi, Lauren D. Zarzar, Tadanori Mammoto, Akiko Mammoto, Amanda Jiang, Joanna Aizenberg, and Donald E. Ingber. Advanced Materials Article first published online: 18 FEB 2014 DOI: 10.1002/adma.201304995

© 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.

A strange state of light

Leave a reply

Apparently combining a hologram with subwavelength structures at a scale of just tens of nanometers can lead to ‘strange’ light. From the Aug. 20, 2013 news item on Nanowerk,

Applied physicists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated that they can change the intensity, phase, and polarization of light rays using a hologram-like design decorated with nanoscale structures.

As a proof of principle, the researchers have used it to create an unusual state of light called a radially polarized beam, which—because it can be focused very tightly—is important for applications like high-resolution lithography and for trapping and manipulating tiny particles like viruses.

The Aug. 20, 2013 Harvard University news release by Manny Marone, which originated the news item, further describes the device and the effect (Note: A link has been removed),

This is the first time a single, simple device has been designed to control these three major properties of light at once. (Phase describes how two waves interfere to either strengthen or cancel each other, depending on how their crests and troughs overlap; polarization describes the direction of light vibrations; and the intensity is the brightness.)

“Our lab works on using nanotechnology to play with light,” says Patrice Genevet, a research associate at Harvard SEAS and co-lead author of a paper published this month in Nano Letters. “In this research, we’ve used holography in a novel way, incorporating cutting-edge nanotechnology in the form of subwavelength structures at a scale of just tens of nanometers.” One nanometer equals one billionth of a meter.

…

Using these novel nanostructured holograms, the Harvard researchers have converted conventional, circularly polarized laser light into radially polarized beams at wavelengths spanning the technologically important visible and near-infrared light spectrum.

“When light is radially polarized, its electromagnetic vibrations oscillate inward and outward from the center of the beam like the spokes of a wheel,” explains Capasso [Federico Capasso, professor of applied physics]. “This unusual beam manifests itself as a very intense ring of light with a dark spot in the center.”

“It is noteworthy,” Capasso points out, “that the same nanostructured holographic plate can be used to create radially polarized light at so many different wavelengths. Radially polarized light can be focused much more tightly than conventionally polarized light, thus enabling many potential applications in microscopy and nanoparticle manipulation.”

The new device resembles a normal hologram grating with an additional, nanostructured pattern carved into it. Visible light, which has a wavelength in the hundreds of nanometers, interacts differently with apertures textured on the ‘nano’ scale than with those on the scale of micrometers or larger. By exploiting these behaviors, the modular interface can bend incoming light to adjust its intensity, phase, and polarization.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the published paper,

Nanostructured Holograms for Broadband Manipulation of Vector Beams by Jiao Lin, Patrice Genevet, Mikhail A. Kats, Nicholas Antoniou, and Federico Capasso. Nano Lett., Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/nl402039y Publication Date (Web): August 5, 2013
Copyright © 2013 American Chemical Society

This article is behind a paywall.

I last wrote about Federico Carpasso’s work in an Oct. 16, 2013 posting, Harvard researchers look deeply into oily puddles as they rethink thin films and optical loss.