Functional Conducting Polymers and Composites

这项计划的研究将集中在开发用于电子和能源转换领域的导电聚合物复合材料。 有机电子正在提供新的运行机制，有望克服目前硅基设备的局限性，包括成本和小型化。然而，将有机材料集成到存储器和晶体管等设备中仍然存在巨大的挑战。拟议的研究计划将专注于开发用于动态随机存取存储器(DRAM)的新型导电聚合物复合材料，动态随机存取存储器是常用的电子设备。在与电气和计算机工程师的合作下，这些努力将集中在提高读取/正确速度和记忆保留(即减少易失性)上。此外，还将处理从设备制造到整合到现有电子平台和流程的各种问题。 鉴于预计能源需求的规模，以及与大气中二氧化碳水平不断上升相关的快速气候变化，各国政府大力推动提高碳中性太阳能燃料生产领域的创新和发现速度。该计划将通过开发膜来帮助满足这一需求，膜将成为独立的人造光合作用设备的关键组件，直接生产太阳能燃料。目前，这些设备的膜的生产代表着一个必须解决的技术差距，以便世界各地的研究人员正在开发的催化剂和光吸收器可以集成到一个工作系统中。现有的与加州理工学院和麻省理工学院研究人员合作开发光吸收剂和催化剂的领先研究项目将使膜设计的进步快速转化为概念验证设备，因此将在这个快速发展的领域产生重大影响。参与这些研究的学生将接受独特的培训，并在加拿大经济中快速增长的可再生能源部门非常受欢迎。

The research to be performed in this program will focus on developing conducting polymer composites for areas in the fields of electronics and energy conversion. Organic-based electronics are providing new mechanisms of operation that promise to overcome current limitations of silicon-based devices, including cost and miniaturization. However, there remain significant challenges for integrating organic materials into devices such as memory and transistors. The proposed research program will focus on the development of new conducting polymer composites for use in dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), commonly used electronic devices. In collaboration with electrical and computer engineers, the efforts will focus on increasing read/right speeds and memory retention (i.e., reducing volatility). In addition, issues ranging from device fabrication to integration into existing electronic platforms and processes will be addressed. Given the scale of projected energy needs as well as the rapid climate change associated with growing CO2 levels in the atmosphere, there is a major push by governments to increase the rate of innovation and discovery in the area of carbon-neutral solar fuel production. This program will help address this need by developing membranes that will be a key component of standalone artificial photosynthetic devices to directly produce solar fuels. Currently, the production of membranes for these devices represents a technology gap that must be addressed so that catalysts and light absorbers being developed by researcher around the world can be integrated into a working system. Existing collaborations with researchers at Caltech and MIT leading research programs developing light absorbers and catalysts will allow rapid translation of advances in membrane design into proof of concept devices and will therefore have a significant impact in this quickly advancing field. Students involved in these studies will be uniquely trained and highly desirable in the rapidly growing renewable energy sector of the Canadian economy.