NANOTECH AND MTC

Soon after joining the Chemistry Department faculty, both Dan Dyer and Shaowei Chen got an early boost from SIUC’s Materials Technology Center, which funded their research (see main article) with seed grants. 

An interdisciplinary center based in the College of Engineering, MTC was launched almost 20 years ago, in 1983, to promote economic growth through research into new materials and new uses for materials.

In its early days, MTC concentrated on carbon composite materials, crucial to the aeronautics and automotive industries. In 1996, it "spun off" its successful work in this area into the new Center for Advanced Friction Studies, a National Science Foundation Cooperative Research Center.

Other early research focuses at MTC included superconducting materials and electrorheological fluids (fluids that instantly solidify when exposed to an electrical field).

Today, MTC supports research in areas ranging from fuel cell materials to composite materials for structures such as bridges and recycled composites using industrial or agricultural byproducts (such as straw or fly ash). The center has funded about two dozen faculty in the past four years alone, in physics, chemistry, and engineering. 

It also received two Technology Challenge Grants in May 2001 from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs. One concerns intelligent transportation systems; the other concerns nanotechnology.

The nanotech grant supports the work of several chemists working with materials at the nanoscale—essentially, at the level of molecules or large assemblies of molecules. 

Dan Dyer and Shaowei Chen will carry out projects similar to those described in this issue of Perspectives (see "Architects of the New").

Lori Vermeulen, an associate professor of chemistry, is developing new silicon-based polymers that are semiconductors and that give off light under the influence of an electrical field. Possible applications include various types of electroluminescent devices, conducting plastics, and chemical sensors. "One of the major goals of the nanotechnology initiative is to exploit the difference in electronic and optical properties of nanoscale materials compared to bulk materials," she says.

Finally, Bakul Dave, an assistant professor of chemistry, has invented so-called "smart" glass, a type of porous glass that can change shape or size in response to heat, acidity, and other conditions. Potential applications include drug-delivery systems and nanodevices such as microscopic tweezers. Dave also can fabricate these glasses to contain protein molecules in their pores (making them bioactive), and he is now trying to incorporate nano-sized magnets in them. Vermeulen’s and Dave’s research has been featured previously in Perspectives. 

MTC director Max Yen, a professor of civil engineering, is coordinating all of this work for DCCA.

"Nanotechnology is one of the biggest efforts at MTC," he says. He sees the DCCA award as a demonstration project to show the public, especially the business community, the potential of nanotechnology. He also sees it as a seed grant from which SIUC researchers can leverage funds. As the field matures, he points out, it will offer more interdisciplinary research opportunities for scientists and engineers.

The increasing miniaturization of devices—most notably, computer chips and their integration into all sorts of products—increasingly requires control of materials at the nano-level. And this control of the "molecular architecture" of materials, as Yen puts it, will also lead to new devices that advance communications technology, medicine, and many other areas.

Such applications will rest on basic research, and so Yen also stresses the need for developing fundamental theories of nanoscience. 

"If we know how things work together and what their desired properties are," he says, "we can develop almost anything we want."

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