CAREER: Manufacturing Cofacially Aligned Nanolayered Architectures through Electrostatic Levitation: Fundamental Research with Integrated Education

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Nanomaterials have changed the world through numerous innovative solutions to energy, electronics, biomedicine, environment and so forth. With a substantially reduced size, the so-called “near-field interaction” (from immediate proximity) between nanolayers become nontrivial, causing unwanted adhesion and disordered agglomeration, a hurdle to harness the full advantage of their unique properties. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports research to investigate the use of electrostatic levitation to overcome the near-field net attraction between nanolayers and to manufacture three-dimensional cofacially aligned nanolayers (3D-CAN) in a scalable manner. 3D-CAN architectures can produce many unmatched properties with broad applications for thermal insulation, signal tuning, catalysis, energy saving, and sensing, etc., with an opportunity to benefit the society with efficient manufacturing solutions, detection systems for healthcare, environment protection, and space exploration, etc. The research and education activities will be integrated through various mechanisms, such as integrating research with new certificate-offering coursework, hosting STEM Days and workshops for community college students, offering a SWE-Teas Research Expo to female undergraduates in collaboration with the Society of Women Engineers, as well as providing the Fun with Electronics events for K-8 minority students, all aiming at fostering a more diverse, domestic engineering workforce in US.The ultimate research goal of this CAREER award is to understand and program the near-field interaction between nanolayers for the manufacturing of scalable 3D-CAN architectures. The team will apply corona discharging to induce quasi-permanent charges into nanolayers to actively program the electrostatic interaction between each nanolayer and further analyze and employ electrostatic levitation to produce 3D-CAN architectures. First, the near-field interaction mechanisms between nanolayers before and after corona-induced charging will be investigated using a surface force apparatus and by atomic force microscopy to establish force-distance profiles. Then, fundamentals in fabricating 3D-CAN at a lab scale will be studied by designing the charge distribution in multi-layer architectures of both ceramic and polymer nanofilms. In addition, manufacturing 3D-CAN, in a production scale, will be explored using an enzyme-assisted roll-to-roll method with power-of-two stacking of nanofilms. Further, the mechanical robustness of electrostatic-levitation enabled 3D-CAN and its capability of extreme thermal insulation will be evaluated with an environmental atomic force microscope and a modified transient plane source, respectively. Research outcomes are expected to expand the understanding, and thus, the capability of controlling near-field interactions between nanomaterials, which will provide a novel solution for efficiently manufacturing of large-scale 3D-CAN and potentially to many other ordered nano-architectures.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.