This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award investigates the formation of extremely high surface area nanostructured ceramic materials. Ceramic materials are widely used as electrodes and in highly efficient electrochemical technologies including solid oxide fuel cells, membrane reactors, gas separators, and energy storage systems. High surface area, nanostructured scaffolds are needed to maximize the efficiency of these technologies which rely on chemical reactions occurring on the surface of the ceramic scaffold. This award supports fundamental research to understand high temperature processing of hybrid inorganic-organic materials, which produce ceramic scaffolds with eighty times more surface area than traditional methods. This novel processing approach works for a wide range of hybrid materials and ceramics, providing a new platform for realizing new and improved ceramic scaffolds, composites, and electrodes. Successfully implementing them in electrochemical systems would transform a broad marketplace encompassing electrical power generation, production of value-added chemicals, gas separation, and renewable energy storage; all directly benefiting society. The educational component of this award supports measuring the positive impact of integrating research and teaching on student intrinsic motivation in STEM. A Science Olympiad outreach program for the lowest performing elementary school in North Carolina is also supported, which will get at-risk minority students excited about science and engineering at an early age, likely increasing their participation in STEM.
The research objective is to test the hypothesis that ceramic scaffold surface area derived from in situ carbon templating of hybrid materials is limited by the degree of metal carbide impurity formation, and that this fundamental limitation can be overcome by controlling the processing gas environment. The research approach is to (1) systematically change the total amount of carbon generated in situ by modifying hybrid inorganic-organic materials, (2) quantify the amount of carbon template and metal carbide impurity present after thermal processing at different temperatures and gas compositions, and (3) correlate the carbon template and metal carbide impurity concentrations to the final ceramic scaffold surface area. Understanding the evolution and impact of the carbon template and metal carbide impurities on scaffold surface area, the fundamental limitations of this approach, and a pathway to overcome the limitations will provide the field with the critical ability to process high surface area, nanostructured ceramic scaffolds. The surface areas and nanomorphologies realized through this work will provide the research community access beyond the current design space for a wide range of applications.
