Conjugated Polymers and Composites for Energy, Electronics and Sensing

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This research program will focus on developing conducting polymer composites to impact the fields of renewable energy, electronics and sensing. Given the scale of projected energy needs as well as the rapid climate change associated with growing carbon dioxide 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 researchers around the world can be integrated into a working system. Existing collaborations with world-renowned researchers at Caltech and MIT with 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. Trainees involved in these studies will gain unique skills and will be highly desirable in the rapidly growing renewable energy sector of the Canadian economy. Organic-based electronics provide 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 in electronic devices. In collaboration with electrical and computer engineers, the efforts will focus on increasing read/write speeds, memory retention (i.e., reducing volatility) and scaling laws (i.e., how small can they be made). In addition, issues ranging from device fabrication to integration into existing electronic platforms and processes will be addressed. The invention of the charge coupled device (CCD) chip has revolutionized the interface between technology and its environment. By pixelating optical images of its surroundings, devices can use sophisticated image processing and pattern recognition algorithms to perform increasingly complex tasks associated with visual perception. The proposed research will focus on creating a chemically diverse sensor array chip that mimics the olfactory system to provide the next revolution in sensory input for technology. Working in collaboration with electrical and computer engineers, integrated circuit sensor arrays will be developed, novel methods for creating large numbers of chemically diverse polymer sensing materials on these chips (i.e., chemical programming) will be demonstrated, and new machine learning algorithms will be explored for processing olfactory data streams.