Suspensions of particles in fluids are everywhere in our life, such as paints, pharmacies, food, etc. Suspensions can exhibit properties that common fluids do not possess. For example, the paint needs to flow well when brushing so that it can be smeared on the wall, which is aided by the...
To address several challenges faced in healthcare, the Triple Aim (3A) was targeted by institutions to improve health outcomes and patient experience while reducing the costs of health. Process improvement techniques in manufacturing, such as Lean systems, were applied as tools to achieve the 3A framework. Unfortunately, the high level...
Nanoparticles (NPs), defined by their size (1-100 nm), are increasingly incorporated into commercial and industrial products due to their high surface area and unique properties. They can be designed for specific applications by manipulating composition, size, shape, and surface functionalization. As NP production and complexity increases, there is a need...
Naked (hull-less) barley has historically been grown for food, but interest in, and breeding efforts for, its use in malting and brewing have increased due to the potential benefits: reduced off-flavors, reduced spent grain, and higher malt extract. These benefits are offset by limiting factors such as high b-glucan and...
The interactions of chemical species with a solid surface play a role in many everyday applications such as heterogeneous catalysis, corrosion, and degradation reactions. Understanding the reaction kinetics and thermodynamics via rate constants and equilibrium constants, which require knowledge of the adsorbed species’ entropy, is essential for tuning these surface...
Nonthermal plasmas generate high concentrations of excited species that can simultaneously exist at high energy and far from thermodynamic equilibrium, making them useful tools in chemistry and engineering. Microplasmas, roughly defined as plasmas that are generated within sub-millimeter dimensions, provide enhanced stability, improved excited species density, increased nonequilibrium properties, higher...
Medical professionals experience higher rates of burnout than other professions due to the highly stressful nature of their environment. In 2018, 94 percent of physicians reported experiencing burnout – characterized by emotional fatigue, and feelings of depersonalization and low personal accomplishment – at some point in their careers. As emotional...
Burnout is a state of physical or emotional exhaustion and disconnectedness induced by continuous stress that affects various aspects of an individual’s life. Physicians experience burnout at a higher rate than other professions due to the highly stressful nature of their work. Consequently, physicians are at a higher risk of...
Copper antimony sulfide (CAS) is a ternary material that is of research interest for thin film photovoltaic applications due to its high absorption coefficient and tunable bandgap. The material is also ideal for sustainable manufacturing due the constituent elements being earth-abundant and less toxic than solar cell absorbers like gallium...
The advent of supercritical CO2 as a new heat-exchange medium has seen strong interest from the power industry and the energy research field recently. It is advan- tageous in comparison with other heat-exchange cycles, as it can be operated safely at much higher temperatures and pressures, thus increasing the thermal...
Surface characterization of materials is widely utilized over a range of disciplines and essential to the development of new materials, technology, or processes. Metal oxide nanoclusters have shown promise as potential new generation photoresist materials for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) nanolithography. Organotin clusters have been proposed as potential candidates for resist...
Hafnium Oxide thin films has had growing attention due hafnium oxide being used as a gate dielectric for MOSFET transistors and a potential next generation photoresist for sub 20 nm patterns. Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) lithography has been identified as the primary candidate technology for generation of sub-20 nm patterns. Current...
Cobalt germanides have been widely studied as semiconductor contact materials, but recent theoretical studies suggest that they may also be excellent catalysts for methane steam reforming with stabilities and activities comparable to noble metal catalysts. In order to study the catalytic activity of cobalt germanides, it is critical to first...
Worldwide production of natural gas has surged in the last few decades leading to an economic windfall for many communities, but sometimes these new sources of natural gas are located in geographically isolated locations. These areas are so remote that it isn’t economically feasible to transport this stranded gas to...
Pesticides benefit agriculture by increasing crop yield, quality, and security. However, pesticides may inadvertently harm bees, which are valuable as pollinators. Thus, candidate pesticides in development pipelines must be assessed for toxicity to bees.
Leveraging a data set of 382 molecules with toxicity labels from honey bee exposure experiments, we...
New high-K dielectric materials are critically needed as chip real-estate becomes more and more of a premium in modern electronics designs. One of the most common devices used in electronics are multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) which are subject to severe volumetric constraints. One effective means to decrease the size of...
Global warming problem is becoming an increasingly important environmental concern and CO₂ is considered as the major cause of global warming. Among various methods of CO₂ utilization, conversion of CO₂ to value added chemical products is the most attractive. In this study, a microscale-based corona reactor is introduced for reduction...
Global warming is becoming an increasingly important environmental concern and CO₂ is considered as the major cause of global warming. Creating useful applications for CO₂ would generate alternatives to merely venting CO₂ to the atmosphere, and decreasing the carbon intensity of human activities. Among various methods of CO₂ utilization, conversion...
Silicon based quantum computing is an attractive approach to large-scale quantum computation due to the significant success of the modern semiconductor fabrication industry. Despite many advances in silicon quantum computing since its inception in 1998, there remains no software for efficiently designing candidate silicon quantum computing devices. Such a development...
Steam distillation has been the common method of extraction of essential oils from plants for more than a century. The use of microwave energy has been suggested as an alternative distillation method that would: reduce water usage, dependence on non-renewable energy sources, and the carbon footprint. A byproduct of this...
The constituent materials of concrete often contain chlorides. The presence of chlorides in sufficient amounts can disrupt the passive layer, also known as the passive film, that protects the reinforcing steel in concrete. This disruption can lead to premature corrosion of the reinforcing steel in concrete. To minimize the risk...
The corrosion and degradation of Ni and its alloys in supercritical carbon dioxide (Sc-CO2) is an emerging issue for material selection and implementation of Sc-CO2 thermal cycles in industry. In this study, we apply density functional theory (DFT) to study the initial steps of carburization of the Ni (111) surface...
Fischer-Tropsh Synthesis is a chemical process that converts CO and H₂ (syngas) into long stable hydrocarbon chains to use as fuel. This process suffers from large product distribution that requires expensive post processing. In this study, the reaction mechanism of hydrocarbon chain growth on Co is investigated on different surface...
Carbon steel, which contains mostly iron, has been widely used as reinforcement in reinforced concrete. In the alkaline environment in reinforced concrete, a thin iron oxide film, called the passive film, forms on the surface of the steel, which protects the surface from active corrosion. The exact atomic structure of...
Recent studies have indicated that nickel gallium alloys can be effective for the catalytic hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol. To simplify the characterization of NiGa catalysts, we are developing model systems using NiGa thin films. We prepared NiGa thin films by RF magnetron sputtering using an equiatomic alloy target, followed...
Hydrogen is the green fuel that can be produced from water through electrolysis and used via hydrogen fuel cells to generate electricity with zero carbon dioxide emission. The commercialization of electrolyzers and fuel cells is the critical step to achieving global carbon neutrality. However, it is severely hampered by the...
High energy density ceramic capacitors with temperature stable permittivity across -150°C to 300°C are desired for a wide variety of electronic devices. Traditional dielectrics such as barium titanate provide a high permittivity but that permittivity is strongly temperature dependent over this specified temperature range. The goal of this work is...
Photoluminescence (PL) materials have attracted a lot of attention in last several decades. Recently PL materials, which can convert low-efficiency Ultraviolet (UV) or Infrared (IR) light to high-efficiency visible light, have been widely applied in the research of improving conversion efficiency of solar cell. As one of the most common...