March_2022_AMP_Digital

A D V A N C E D M A T E R I A L S & P R O C E S S E S | M A R C H 2 0 2 2 5 FROM BIOMASS TO PLASTIC Researchers from the University of Delaware (UD) are teaming up with colleagues at the University of Kansas and Pittsburg State University to tackle plastic pollution. The National Science Foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research award- ed the group $4million toward this goal. Roughly $1.4 million will go to UD to de- velop processes that will transform bio- mass such as agricultural byproducts into commercially viable plastics ma- terials, and to chemically deconstruct the plastics so they can be reused. The project will concentrate on developing polymers that behave like polyethylene terephthalate (PET). By focusing on biomass that is not edible, the team will try to prepare new building blocks for plastics that do not RESEARCH TRACKS compete with food sources, do not de- pend on fossil fu- els, and can be eas- ily assembled. Over the next four years, up to five UD grad- uate students will study the chemistry of the components and use machine learning to explore the existing litera- ture and knowledge gaps. They will also study the econom- ics of the new plas- tic materials. Their work will closely examine how to de- construct these new polymers to cre- ate a truly recyclable product. “If we succeed, we might be able to reduce, to some degree, the quantity of plas- tics or the amount of oil we consume,” says chemical engineering professor Raul Lobo, who is leading the UD research ef- fort. www.udel.edu . RECORD-SETTING SOLAR CELLS In a joint effort be- tween Pavia University, Ita- ly, and TU Dresden, Germa- ny, researchers developed an innovative method to fabricate lead halide per- ovskite solar cells with re- cord efficiency. Specifically, the new process significant- Courtesy of Dionisios Vlachos. ly improves the efficiency of inverted architecture solar cells. The new tech- nique is based on modifying the inter- faces of the perovskite active layer by introducing small amounts of organic halide salts at both the bottom and top of the perovskite layer. These organic halide salts, typically used to form 2D perovskites, led to suppression of mi- crostructural flaws and passivation of defects in the perovskite layer. Using this approach, the team achieved a power conversion efficiency of 23.7%—the highest reported to date for an inverted architecture perovskite solar cell. “The fact that our devices are fabricated at low temperatures of less than 100°C, and that our approach is fully applicable to the fabrication of large-area devices, takes us one step closer to large-scale utilization of per- ovskite solar cells,” explains Professor Yana Vaynzof of TU Dresden. www. tu-dresden.de . Nanomaterials of perovskite dispersed in hexane and irradiated by a laser. Courtesy of Luiz Gustavo Bonato. Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, received $16.2 million from The Werner Siemens Foundation, Switzerland, in support of the lab’s CarboQuant project. The goal is to lay the foundations for novel quantum technologies that could operate at room temperature, unlike most current methods that require cooling to near absolute zero. www.empa.ch. BRIEF