Tag Archives: Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb

Back to my roots, writing nanotechnology

This July 18, 2011 news item title, Writing Nanostructures: Heated AFM Tip Allows Direct Fabrication of Ferroelectric Nanostructures On Plastic, on the Science Daily website brought back memories. The first part of the title, Writing Nanostructures, that is. My first project about nanotechnology and the language used to describe it for my master’s degree was titled, Writing Nanotechnology.

This, of course, is something entirely different. From the news item on Science Daily,

Using a technique known as thermochemical nanolithography (TCNL), researchers have developed a new way to fabricate nanometer-scale ferroelectric structures directly on flexible plastic substrates that would be unable to withstand the processing temperatures normally required to create such nanostructures.

The technique, which uses a heated atomic force microscope (AFM) tip to produce patterns, could facilitate high-density, low-cost production of complex ferroelectric structures for energy harvesting arrays, sensors and actuators in nano-electromechanical systems (NEMS) and micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). The research was reported July 15 in the journal Advanced Materials.

“We can directly create piezoelectric materials of the shape we want, where we want them, on flexible substrates for use in energy harvesting and other applications,” said Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

I particularly like this picture where the professor is holding something that looks like a pencil as a pointer,

Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellow Suenne Kim holds a sample of flexible polyimide substrate used in research on a new technique for producing ferroelectric nanostructures. Assistant professor Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb points to a feature on the material, while graduate research assistant Yaser Bastani observes. (Credit: Gary Meek)

You can check out the rest  in the Science Daily news item or you can check out the original Georgia Institute of Technology news release (which has more images) written by John Toon.