Mukhopadhyay’s Presentation at Columbia University’s Materials Science & Engineering Colloquium
Advanced Materials & Devices for Sensors and Intelligent Technologies
Sharmila Mukhopadhyay, Director, Frontier Institute for Research in Sensor Technologies (FIRST), University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469
This talk will highlight recent activities in our team to bring together researchers from different disciplines in order to develop and implement innovative programs in advanced materials and sensor systems related to grand challenges in energy, health, and environment. One of the cross-cutting research areas that will be discussed is the development of bio-mimetic hierarchical hybrid materials that offer the unprecedented advantages of nano-solids while minimizing their environmental proliferation risks. This architecture, common in natural living systems such as microvilli and dendrites, but is rarely utilized in engineered devices due to the challenges of controlling the complex interfaces between solid units having different composition, geometries and inter-atomic bonds.
Recent advances in nano-technology and defect engineering have made it possible to develop such materials in the laboratory, where a selected larger substrate is covalently bonded to progressively smaller functional entities. This design offers robust reusable materials having exceptionally high levels of solid-environment interaction in very compact space interactive functions such as signal sensing and responding, catalysis, electrochemical exchange, multiscale structural support and tissue engineering. A typical architecture consist of covalently bonded carpet-like arrays of electrically and thermally conducting carbon nanotubes (CNT) attached on porous conducting membranes using a two-step technique developed by this team. The nanotube carpets create orders of magnitude increase in surface area, without any significant change in weight or volume. These surfaces are then functionalized with catalysts, receptors and/or biomolecules for tailoring their fluid permeation, chemical, catalytic, and bio-scaffolding properties. Materials fabricated to date have demonstrated unique performance advantages in a diverse variety of applications such as bio-detection, thermal management, charge storage, tissue engineering and pollutant degradation.