Tag Archives: Iowa State University (IA)

Electronics repairs in space made possible with nanoink and 3D printing?

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Researchers — as well as a toy Cy the Cyclone — test their nanoink and printer technologies during a NASA microgravity flight. Pictured, left to right, are: Fei Liu, Yanhua Huang, Matthew Marander, Xuepeng Jiang and Pavithra Premaratne. Photo courtesy of Shan Jiang.

They’re not making any promises but there are possibilities according to a November 21, 2024 news item on phys.org,

An Iowa State University engineer floats in the air while other researchers hang tight to a metal frame surrounding and supporting their special printer. [A Cy the Cyclone toy mascot all dressed up as an astronaut also floats above the busy researchers hunched over their experiment.] It’s not the usual photo you see in a research paper. Tests aboard microgravity flights aren’t your typical materials experiments, either.

…

A November 20, 2024 Iowa State University news release (also on EurekAlert but published November 21, 2024), which originated the news item, shows where curiosity can take you,

The flight path to these experiments began when a research team led by Iowa State’s Shan Jiang, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, and Hantang Qin, formerly of Iowa State who’s now an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wondered if their ink and printer technologies would work in the zero gravity of space.

The ink features silver nanoparticles synthesized with biobased polymers. After a heat treatment, the ink can conduct electricity and can therefore print electric circuits. The printer uses electrohydrodynamic printing, or 3D printing that jets ink under an electric field at resolutions of millionths of a meter. The electric field could eliminate the need for gravity to help deposit ink.

If the technologies work together in zero gravity, astronauts could use them to make electric circuits for spacecraft or equipment repairs. And astronauts might manufacture high-value electronic components in the special, zero-gravity environment of space.

NASA [(US) National Space and Aeronautics Agency] wondered if it would work, too.

Diving into microgravity

Researchers bolted the printer to the floor of a jet and prepared for a “roller coaster, basically,” Jiang said.

The NASA plane would continuously climb and dive, going in cycles from about 24,000 feet over Florida to 32,000 feet then back to 24,000. The dive phase produced about 10 seconds of pure zero gravity.

“It was exciting and new,” Jiang said.

Motion sickness was a problem for some. Others enjoyed the thrill of it. Jiang felt “frozen” the first time he experienced microgravity. “I was blank.”

But that didn’t last: “There was so much time and investment in this project. We wanted to achieve good results.”

But printing for a few seconds at a time on a microgravity flight “is a very challenging experiment,” Jiang said. “It’s so easy on the ground where everything is stable. But if anything gets loose during the flight, you lose your printing.”

The first microgravity flight was a good example. The printer wasn’t adequately secured against the plane’s shakes and vibrations.

“These are very intense experiments that require a lot of teamwork and preparation,” Jiang said.

So, the team went back to work, made some changes, made more test flights and produced better results.

“This proof-of-concept microgravity experiment proves the unique capability of (electrohydrodynamic) printing under zero-gravity conditions and opens a new venue for future on-demand manufacturing in space,” the researchers wrote in a paper published by the journal American Chemical Society Applied Materials & Interfaces. (…)

Making a new nanoink

The key innovation by Jiang’s research group was developing a new laboratory method to synthesize the ink with its silver nanoparticles.

“This is a new combination of materials and so we needed a new recipe to make the ink,” Jiang said.

Grants from the NASA Iowa Space Grant Consortium and the NASA Iowa Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research supported the project.

Both programs “strive to support innovative and leading research in Iowa,” said Sara Nelson, director of the programs and an Iowa State adjunct assistant professor of aerospace engineering. “We are thrilled to have supported Dr. Jiang’s research. His work has helped to build Iowa’s research infrastructure and is an important part of NASA’s strategic mission.”

The project also makes use of an abundant Iowa resource, plant biomass.

The ink includes a biobased polymer called 2-hydroxyethyl cellulose, which is typically used as a thickening agent. But it is also a cost-effective, biocompatible, versatile and stable material for the inks necessary for high-resolution ink jet printing under an electric field.

“There is a lot of biomass in Iowa,” Jiang said. “So, we’re always trying to use these biobased molecules. They make a wonderful polymer that does all the tricks for us.”

Jiang called that “the biggest surprise of this research. We didn’t know that before. Now we know what we can do with these biobased polymers.”

The Iowa State University Research Foundation has filed a patent on the new nanoink and the technology is currently available for licensing.

“This success is really just the beginning,” Jiang said. “As humanity ventures deeper into space, the need for on-demand manufacturing of electronics in orbit is no longer science fiction; it is a necessity.”

Next up for the researchers could be development of 3D space printing for other electronic components such as semiconductors.

After all, Jiang said, “You can’t just make one component and assemble an electronic device.”

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

Silver Nano-Inks Synthesized with Biobased Polymers for High-Resolution Electrohydrodynamic Printing Toward In-Space Manufacturing by Tyler Kirscht, Liangkui Jiang, Fei Liu, Xuepeng Jiang, Matthew Marander, Ricardo Ortega, Hantang Qin, Shan Jiang. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2024, 16, 33, 44225–44235 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.4c07592 Published: July 30, 2024 Copyright © 2024 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

3D-printed graphene sensors for highly sensitive food freshness detection

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I love the opening line (lede). From a June 29, 2020 news item on Nanowerk,

Researchers dipped their new, printed sensors into tuna broth and watched the readings.

It turned out the sensors – printed with high-resolution aerosol jet printers on a flexible polymer film and tuned to test for histamine, an allergen and indicator of spoiled fish and meat – can detect histamine down to 3.41 parts per million.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has set histamine guidelines of 50 parts per million in fish, making the sensors more than sensitive enough to track food freshness and safety.

…

I find using 3D-printing techniques to produce graphene, a 2-d material, intriguing. Apparently, the technique is cheaper and offers an advantage as it allows for greater precision than other techniques (inkjet printing, chemical vapour depostion [CVD], etc.)

Here’s more detail from a June 25, 2020 Iowa State University news release (also on EurekAlert but published June 29, 2020), which originated the news item,

Making the sensor technology possible is graphene, a supermaterial that’s a carbon honeycomb just an atom thick and known for its strength, electrical conductivity, flexibility and biocompatibility. Making graphene practical on a disposable food-safety sensor is a low-cost, aerosol-jet-printing technology that’s precise enough to create the high-resolution electrodes necessary for electrochemical sensors to detect small molecules such as histamine.

“This fine resolution is important,” said Jonathan Claussen, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State University and one of the leaders of the research project. “The closer we can print these electrode fingers, in general, the higher the sensitivity of these biosensors.”

Claussen and the other project leaders – Carmen Gomes, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State; and Mark Hersam, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois – have recently reported their sensor discovery in a paper published online by the journal 2D Materials. (…)

…

The paper describes how graphene electrodes were aerosol jet printed on a flexible polymer and then converted to histamine sensors by chemically binding histamine antibodies to the graphene. The antibodies specifically bind histamine molecules.

The histamine blocks electron transfer and increases electrical resistance, Gomes said. That change in resistance can be measured and recorded by the sensor.

“This histamine sensor is not only for fish,” Gomes said. “Bacteria in food produce histamine. So it can be a good indicator of the shelf life of food.”

The researchers believe the concept will work to detect other kinds of molecules, too.

“Beyond the histamine case study presented here, the (aerosol jet printing) and functionalization process can likely be generalized to a diverse range of sensing applications including environmental toxin detection, foodborne pathogen detection, wearable health monitoring, and health diagnostics,” they wrote in their research paper.

For example, by switching the antibodies bonded to the printed sensors, they could detect salmonella bacteria, or cancers or animal diseases such as avian influenza, the researchers wrote.

Claussen, Hersam and other collaborators (…) have demonstrated broader application of the technology by modifying the aerosol-jet-printed sensors to detect cytokines, or markers of inflammation. The sensors, as reported in a recent paper published by ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, can monitor immune system function in cattle and detect deadly and contagious paratuberculosis at early stages.

Claussen, who has been working with printed graphene for years, said the sensors have another characteristic that makes them very useful: They don’t cost a lot of money and can be scaled up for mass production.

“Any food sensor has to be really cheap,” Gomes said. “You have to test a lot of food samples and you can’t add a lot of cost.”

Claussen and Gomes know something about the food industry and how it tests for food safety. Claussen is chief scientific officer and Gomes is chief research officer for NanoSpy Inc., a startup company based in the Iowa State University Research Park that sells biosensors to food processing companies.

They said the company is in the process of licensing this new histamine and cytokine sensor technology.

It, after all, is what they’re looking for in a commercial sensor. “This,” Claussen said, “is a cheap, scalable, biosensor platform.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the two papers mentioned in the news release,

Aerosol-jet-printed graphene electrochemical histamine sensors for food safety monitoring by Kshama Parate, Cícero C Pola, Sonal V Rangnekar, Deyny L Mendivelso-Perez, Emily A Smith, Mark C Hersam, Carmen L Gomes and Jonathan C Claussen. 2D Materials, Volume 7, Number 3 DOI https://doi.org/10.1088/2053-1583/ab8919 Published 10 June 2020 • © 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd

Aerosol-Jet-Printed Graphene Immunosensor for Label-Free Cytokine Monitoring in Serum by Kshama Parate, Sonal V. Rangnekar, Dapeng Jing, Deyny L. Mendivelso-Perez, Shaowei Ding, Ethan B. Secor, Emily A. Smith, Jesse M. Hostetter, Mark C. Hersam, and Jonathan C. Claussen. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2020, 12, 7, 8592–8603 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.9b22183 Publication Date: February 10, 2020 Copyright © 2020 American Chemical Society

Both papers are behind paywalls.

You can find the NanoSpy website here.

A 3D paper-based microbial fuel cell (MFC) from Iowa State University (US)

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A July 1, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily proclaims the news about a paper-based microbial fuel cell (MFC),

A team of researchers from the Iowa State University in Ames, IA has demonstrated a proof-of-concept three-dimensional paper-based microbial fuel cell (MFC) that could take advantage of capillary action to guide the liquids through the MFC system and to eliminate the need for external power. …

A July 1, 2016 (?) World Scientific news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the MFC in greater detail,

The paper-based MFC runs for five days and shows the production of current as a result of biofilm formation on anode. The system produces 1.3 µW of power and 52.25 µA of current yielding a power density of approximately 25 W/m3 for this experiment. These results show that the paper-based microbial fuel cells can create power in an environmentally friendly mode without the use of any outside power. “All power created in this device is useable because no electricity is needed to run the fluids through the device. This is crucial in the advancement of these devices and the expansion of their applications.” says Nastaran Hashemi, PhD, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the senior author of the paper.

The biofilm formation on the carbon cloth during the test provides further evidence that the current measured was the result of the bio-chemical reaction taking place. This is important because the biofilm plays a vital role in current production of a microbial fuel cell. Increased biofilm size and thickness ultimately leads to increased current production. Individual bacterial cells metabolize electron-rich substances in a complex process involving many enzyme-catalyzed reactions. The electrons are then free to travel to the anode through one of many modes of electron transport. Electron transport is very complicated, and evidence suggests that it is unique to each type of bacteria. For Shewanella Oneidensis MR-1, the most predominantly known ways of shuttling electrons from the individual bacteria cells to the anode are through direct contact, excreted soluble redox molecules, and biological nanowires. Of these, it is widely believed that excreted soluble redox molecules serving as extracellular electron shuttles makes up for as much as 70% of electron transfer mechanisms from individual bacterial cells to the electrode. Moreover, it is shown that direct contact between individual S. Oneidensis MR-1 and the electrode has little impact on the current generation, supporting a mediated electron transfer mechanism. Biofilm helps with the adsorption of the redox molecules to the electrode, which makes it important to have in high power density microbial fuel cells. There are not many studies on power production from paper-based microbial fuel cells running for few days. Without enough time for biofilm to form, the reported current and power data would predominantly be associated with extracellular electron transfer, which represents does not fully represent electrical producing capabilities of microbial fuel cells. This device for the first time demonstrates the longer duration of use and ability to operate individually, a development that could help increase the number of situations where microbial fuel cells can be applied.

The Iowa State University team is currently exploring options to better control the voltage output and create constant current. Controlled environment tests will aid in the regulation of the systems output and yield more stable results. For optimal usability and decrease in cost, the team would also like to explore a device that would not need to use Nafion and Potassium Ferricyanide in its application. …

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

A paper-based microbial fuel cell operating under continuous flow condition by Niloofar Hashemi, Joshua M. Lackore, Farrokh Sharifi, Payton J. Goodrich, Megan L. Winchell, Nastaran Hashemi. Technology 04, 98 (2016). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/S2339547816400124

I believe this paper is behind a paywall.