Tag Archives: Sandia Labs

Sandia National Laboratories looking for commercial partners to bring titanium dioxide nanoparticles (5 nm in diameter) to market

Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia Labs) doesn’t  ask directly but I think the call for partners is more than heavily implied. Let’s start with a June 17, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily,

Sandia National Laboratories has come up with an inexpensive way to synthesize titanium-dioxide nanoparticles and is seeking partners who can demonstrate the process at industrial scale for everything from solar cells to light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

Titanium-dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles show great promise as fillers to tune the refractive index of anti-reflective coatings on signs and optical encapsulants for LEDs, solar cells and other optical devices. Optical encapsulants are coverings or coatings, usually made of silicone, that protect a device.

Industry has largely shunned TiO2 nanoparticles because they’ve been difficult and expensive to make, and current methods produce particles that are too large.

Sandia became interested in TiO2 for optical encapsulants because of its work on LED materials for solid-state lighting.

Current production methods for TiO2 often require high-temperature processing or costly surfactants — molecules that bind to something to make it soluble in another material, like dish soap does with fat.
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Those methods produce less-than-ideal nanoparticles that are very expensive, can vary widely in size and show significant particle clumping, called agglomeration.

Sandia’s technique, on the other hand, uses readily available, low-cost materials and results in nanoparticles that are small, roughly uniform in size and don’t clump.

“We wanted something that was low cost and scalable, and that made particles that were very small,” said researcher Todd Monson, who along with principal investigator Dale Huber patented the process in mid-2011 as “High-yield synthesis of brookite TiO2 nanoparticles.” [emphases mine]

A June 17, 2014 Sandia Labs news release, which originated the news item, goes on to describe the technology (Note: Links have been removed),

Their (Monson and Huber) method produces nanoparticles roughly 5 nanometers in diameter, approximately 100 times smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so there’s little light scattering, Monson said.

“That’s the advantage of nanoparticles — not just nanoparticles, but small nanoparticles,” he said.

Scattering decreases the amount of light transmission. Less scattering also can help extract more light, in the case of an LED, or capture more light, in the case of a solar cell.

TiO2 can increase the refractive index of materials, such as silicone in lenses or optical encapsulants. Refractive index is the ability of material to bend light. Eyeglass lenses, for example, have a high refractive index.

Practical nanoparticles must be able to handle different surfactants so they’re soluble in a wide range of solvents. Different applications require different solvents for processing.

“If someone wants to use TiO2 nanoparticles in a range of different polymers and applications, it’s convenient to have your particles be suspension-stable in a wide range of solvents as well,” Monson said. “Some biological applications may require stability in aqueous-based solvents, so it could be very useful to have surfactants available that can make the particles stable in water.”

The researchers came up with their synthesis technique by pooling their backgrounds — Huber’s expertise in nanoparticle synthesis and polymer chemistry and Monson’s knowledge of materials physics. The work was done under a Laboratory Directed Research and Development project Huber began in 2005.

“The original project goals were to investigate the basic science of nanoparticle dispersions, but when this synthesis was developed near the end of the project, the commercial applications were obvious,” Huber said. The researchers subsequently refined the process to make particles easier to manufacture.

Existing synthesis methods for TiO2 particles were too costly and difficult to scale up production. In addition, chemical suppliers ship titanium-dioxide nanoparticles dried and without surfactants, so particles clump together and are impossible to break up. “Then you no longer have the properties you want,” Monson said.

The researchers tried various types of alcohol as an inexpensive solvent to see if they could get a common titanium source, titanium isopropoxide, to react with water and alcohol.

The biggest challenge, Monson said, was figuring out how to control the reaction, since adding water to titanium isopropoxide most often results in a fast reaction that produces large chunks of TiO2, rather than nanoparticles. “So the trick was to control the reaction by controlling the addition of water to that reaction,” he said.

Some textbooks dismissed the titanium isopropoxide-water-alcohol method as a way of making TiO2 nanoparticles. Huber and Monson, however, persisted until they discovered how to add water very slowly by putting it into a dilute solution of alcohol. “As we tweaked the synthesis conditions, we were able to synthesize nanoparticles,” Monson said.

Whoever wrote the news release now makes the plea which isn’t quite a plea (Note: A link has been removed),

The next step is to demonstrate synthesis at an industrial scale, which will require a commercial partner. Monson, who presented the work at Sandia’s fall Science and Technology Showcase, said Sandia has received inquiries from companies interested in commercializing the technology.

“Here at Sandia we’re not set up to produce the particles on a commercial scale,” he said. “We want them to pick it up and run with it and start producing these on a wide enough scale to sell to the end user.”

Sandia would synthesize a small number of particles, then work with a partner company to form composites and evaluate them to see if they can be used as better encapsulants for LEDs, flexible high-index refraction composites for lenses or solar concentrators. “I think it can meet quite a few needs,” Monson said.

I wish them good luck.

McGill University and Sandia Labs validate Luttinger liquid model predictions

A collaboration between McGill University (Québec, Canada) and Sandia National Laboratories (New Mexico, US) has resulted in the answer to a question that was posed over 50 years ago in the field of quantum physics according to a Jan. 23, 2014 McGill University news release (also on EurekAlert),

How would electrons behave if confined to a wire so slender they could pass through it only in single-file?

The question has intrigued scientists for more than half a century. In 1950, Japanese Nobel Prize winner Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, followed by American physicist Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger in 1963, came up with a mathematical model showing that the effects of one particle on all others in a one-dimensional line would be much greater than in two- or three-dimensional spaces. Among quantum physicists, this model came to be known as the “Luttinger liquid” state.

The news release provides more information about the problem and about how the scientists addressed it,

What does one-dimensional quantum physics involve?  Gervais [Professor Guillaume Gervais of McGill’s Department of Physics] explains it this way: “Imagine that you are driving on a highway and the traffic is not too dense. If a car stops in front of you, you can get around it by passing to the left or right. That’s two-dimensional physics. But if you enter a tunnel with a single lane and a car stops, all the other cars behind it must slam on the brakes. That’s the essence of the Luttinger liquid effect. The way electrons behave in the Luttinger state is entirely different because they all become coupled to one another.”

To scientists, “what is so fascinating and elegant about quantum physics in one dimension is that the solutions are mathematically exact,” Gervais adds. “In most other cases, the solutions are only approximate.”

Making a device with the correct parameters to conduct the experiment was no simple task, however, despite the team’s 2011 discovery of a way to do so. It took years of trial, and more than 250 faulty devices – each of which required 29 processing steps – before Laroche’s [McGill PhD student Dominique Laroche[ painstaking efforts succeeded in producing functional devices yielding reliable data.  “So many things could go wrong during the fabrication process that troubleshooting the failed devices felt like educated guesswork at times,” explains Laroche.  “Adding in the inherent failure rate compounded at each processing step made the fabrication of these devices extremely challenging.”

In particular, the experiment measures the effect that a very small electrical current in one of the wires has on a nearby wire.  This can be viewed as the “friction” between the two circuits, and the experiment shows that this friction increases as the circuits are cooled to extremely low temperatures. This effect is a strong prediction of Luttinger liquid theory.

“It took a very long time to make these devices,” said Lilly. “It’s not impossible to do in other labs, but Sandia has crystal-growing capabilities, a microfabrication facility, and support for fundamental research from DOE’s office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES), and we’re very interested in understanding the fundamental ideas that drive the behavior of very small systems.”

The findings could lead to practical applications in electronics and other fields. While it’s difficult at this stage to predict what those might be, “the same was true in the case of the laser when it was invented,” Gervais notes.  “Nanotechnologies are already helping us in medicine, electronics and engineering – and this work shows that they can help us get to the bottom of a long-standing question in quantum physics.”

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

1D-1D Coulomb Drag Signature of a Luttinger Liquid by D. Laroche, G. Gervais, M. P. Lilly, and J. L. Reno. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1244152 Published Online January 23 2014

This paper is behind a paywall.

Cooling it—an application using carbon nanotubes and a theory that hotter leads to cooler

The only thing these two news items have in common is their focus on cooling down electronic devices. Well, there’s also the fact that the work is being done at the nanoscale.

First, there’s a Jan. 23, 2014 news item on Azonano about a technique using carbon nanotubes to cool down microprocessors,

“Cool it!” That’s a prime directive for microprocessor chips and a promising new solution to meeting this imperative is in the offing. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a “process friendly” technique that would enable the cooling of microprocessor chips through carbon nanotubes.

Frank Ogletree, a physicist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, led a study in which organic molecules were used to form strong covalent bonds between carbon nanotubes and metal surfaces. This improved by six-fold the flow of heat from the metal to the carbon nanotubes, paving the way for faster, more efficient cooling of computer chips. The technique is done through gas vapor or liquid chemistry at low temperatures, making it suitable for the manufacturing of computer chips.

The Jan. 22, 2014 Berkeley Lab news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the nature  of the problem in more detail,

Overheating is the bane of microprocessors. As transistors heat up, their performance can deteriorate to the point where they no longer function as transistors. With microprocessor chips becoming more densely packed and processing speeds continuing to increase, the overheating problem looms ever larger. The first challenge is to conduct heat out of the chip and onto the circuit board where fans and other techniques can be used for cooling. Carbon nanotubes have demonstrated exceptionally high thermal conductivity but their use for cooling microprocessor chips and other devices has been hampered by high thermal interface resistances in nanostructured systems.

“The thermal conductivity of carbon nanotubes exceeds that of diamond or any other natural material but because carbon nanotubes are so chemically stable, their chemical interactions with most other materials are relatively weak, which makes for  high thermal interface resistance,” Ogletree says. “Intel came to the Molecular Foundry wanting to improve the performance of carbon nanotubes in devices. Working with Nachiket Raravikar and Ravi Prasher, who were both Intel engineers when the project was initiated, we were able to increase and strengthen the contact between carbon nanotubes and the surfaces of other materials. This reduces thermal resistance and substantially improves heat transport efficiency.”

The news release then describes the proposed solution,

Sumanjeet Kaur, lead author of the Nature Communications paper and an expert on carbon nanotubes, with assistance from co-author and Molecular Foundry chemist Brett Helms, used reactive molecules to bridge the carbon nanotube/metal interface – aminopropyl-trialkoxy-silane (APS) for oxide-forming metals, and cysteamine for noble metals. First vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays were grown on silicon wafers, and thin films of aluminum or gold were evaporated on glass microscope cover slips. The metal films were then “functionalized” and allowed to bond with the carbon nanotube arrays. Enhanced heat flow was confirmed using a characterization technique developed by Ogletree that allows for interface-specific measurements of heat transport.

“You can think of interface resistance in steady-state heat flow as being an extra amount of distance the heat has to flow through the material,” Kaur says. “With carbon nanotubes, thermal interface resistance adds something like 40 microns of distance on each side of the actual carbon nanotube layer. With our technique, we’re able to decrease the interface resistance so that the extra distance is around seven microns at each interface.”

Although the approach used by Ogletree, Kaur and their colleagues substantially strengthened the contact between a metal and individual carbon nanotubes within an array, a majority of the nanotubes within the array may still fail to connect with the metal. The Berkeley team is now developing a way to improve the density of carbon nanotube/metal contacts. Their technique should also be applicable to single and multi-layer graphene devices, which face the same cooling issues.

For anyone who’s never heard of the Molecular Foundry before (from the news release),

The Molecular Foundry is one of five DOE [Department of Energy] Nanoscale Science Research Centers (NSRCs), national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale, supported by the DOE Office of Science. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize, and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE’s Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge and Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories.

My second item comes from the University of Buffalo (UB), located in the US. From a Jan. 21, 2014 University of Buffalo news release by Cory Nealon (also on EurekAlert),

Heat in electronic devices is generated by the movement of electrons through transistors, resistors and other elements of an electrical network. Depending on the network, there are a variety of ways, such as cooling fans and heat sinks, to prevent the circuits from overheating.

But as more integrated circuits and transistors are added to devices to boost their computing power, it’s becoming more difficult to keep those elements cool. Most nanoelectrics research centers are working to develop advanced materials that are capable of withstanding the extreme environment inside smartphones, laptops and other devices.

While advanced materials show tremendous potential, the UB research suggests there may still be room within the existing paradigm of electronic devices to continue developing more powerful computers.

To support their findings, the researchers fabricated nanoscale semiconductor devices in a state-of-the-art gallium arsenide crystal provided to UB by Sandia’s Reno [John L. Reno, Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Sandia National Laboratories]. The researchers then subjected the chip to a large voltage, squeezing an electrical current through the nanoconductors. This, in turn, increased the amount of heat circulating through the chip’s nanotransistor.

But instead of degrading the device, the nanotransistor spontaneously transformed itself into a quantum state that was protected from the effect of heating and provided a robust channel of electric current. To help explain, Bird [Jonathan Bird, UB professor of electrical engineering] offered an analogy to Niagara Falls.

“The water, or energy, comes from a source; in this case, the Great Lakes. It’s channeled into a narrow point (the Niagara River) and ultimately flows over Niagara Falls. At the bottom of waterfall is dissipated energy. But unlike the waterfall, this dissipated energy recirculates throughout the chip and changes how heat affects, or in this case doesn’t affect, the network’s operation.”

While this behavior may seem unusual, especially conceptualizing it in terms of water flowing over a waterfall, it is the direct result of the quantum mechanical nature of electronics when viewed on the nanoscale. The current is made up of electrons which spontaneously organize to form a narrow conducting filament through the nanoconductor. It is this filament that is so robust against the effects of heating.

“We’re not actually eliminating the heat, but we’ve managed to stop it from affecting the electrical network. In a way, this is an optimization of the current paradigm,” said Han [J. E. Han, UB Dept. of Physics], who developed the theoretical models which explain the findings.

What an interesting and counter-intuitive approach to managing the heat in our devices.

For those who want more, here’s a link to and citation for the carbon nanotube paper,

Enhanced thermal transport at covalently functionalized carbon nanotube array interfaces by Sumanjeet Kaur, Nachiket Raravikar, Brett A. Helms, Ravi Prasher, & D. Frank Ogletree. Nature Communications 5, Article number: 3082 doi:10.1038/ncomms4082 Published 22 January 2014

This paper is behind a paywall.

Now here’s a link to and a citation for the ‘making it hotter to make it cooler’ paper,

Formation of a protected sub-band for conduction in quantum point contacts under extreme biasing by J. Lee, J. E. Han, S. Xiao, J. Song, J. L. Reno, & J. P. Bird. Nature Nanotechnology (2014) doi:10.1038/nnano.2013.297 Published online 19 January 2014

This paper is behind a paywall although there is an option to preview it for free via ReadCube Access.

Fish camouflage, Australian webinar for nano business, medical nanobots in your bloodstream and Simon Fraser U has nano news

First off, the American Chemical Society (ACS) has declared ‘The Nano Song‘ a winner (in the People’s Choice and Critic’s Choice categories)  in their ACS Nanotation web community video contest ‘What is Nano?’.  If you haven’t seen the video yet, you can go here (scroll down).

Researchers at Sandia Labs are working to develop materials that change colour in the same that some fish can. Here’s how it works with the fish (from Nanowerk News here):

Certain fish species blend with their environment by changing color like chameleons. Their tiny motor proteins carry skin pigment crystals in their “tails” as they walk with their “feet” along the microtubule skeletons of cells to rearrange the animal’s color display.

The fish change colour as the environment around them changes. The researchers led by George Bachand are trying to enable synthetic or hybrid materials to do the same thing. Applications could be for military and/or fashion.

If you’re interested in the business end of nano, then there’s a webinar courtesy of the Australian Office of Nanotechnology coming up on April 29, 2009. NanoVentures Australia CEO, Peter Binks, will be talking about nanotechnology’s impact on global markets and industries. For more info. about the event, check here and to sign up for the event, go here.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University (US) are honing in on a way to get hordes of microrobots (or nanobots) that have been introduced into the bloodstream to flock or swarm together so they can repair organs or deliver drugs to a specific target. I gather the problem has been  getting the machines to work together and the proposed solution is to use UV light. More details here.

Finally, some latebreaking news from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada). The university’s nano research facility, 4D Labs, has won funding (roughly $884, 000) from the federal government’s Western Economic Diversification agency to build a maskwritiing facility.  More about this tomorrow.