This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twelve-month research fellowship by Dr. Vasana Maneeratana to work with Dr. Markus Antonietti at Max Planck Institute in Germany and with Dr. Clement Sanchez at Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in France.
Currently, the interests in energy and renewable resources are at the forefront of the attention of researchers, industry and media in both the United States and the rest of the world. It is an exciting movement for the field of materials science to bridge more ideas into conception to provide solutions to new energy resources. This allows for interdisciplinary synergy to provide real-time solutions, while contributing to the fabric of science. Unique work permeates through each country concurrently with concern for depleting resources in fossil fuels and coal-dependence. As an example, in the United States, there has been a rapid surge to find solutions to the dependence on foreign oil, thereby expanding knowledge of fuel cells, batteries and alternative forms of harvesting energy. Solar cells and hydrogen fuel cells are just a few examples of areas of vast research. Work in designing renewable resources to produce devices for energy has matured alongside the concept of green and sustainable principles. Building new devices from materials for sustainable energy applications should also incorporate sustainable design thereby including green chemistry principles, to thus produce low waste, be less hazardous, and have the ability to break down into innocuous materials. This fellowship proposes to design and produce photocatalytic efficient devices to address the use of solar energy while incorporating sustainable design principles. Thereby using the process of electrospinning, a bottom-up approach to producing both nano and micronmeter scaled fiber mats can be fabricated. This fabrication development also creates new production pathways for materials for fuel cells and other energy-based devices. Direct electrospinning, as developed by the Principal Investigator (PI), is an approach, which minimizes processing time and steps in producing the designed and desired product. The overall goal of the PI is to utilize direct electrospinning as a method to incorporate chemical designed precursors to produce high-surface area, multi-layered materials for energy-based applications. It is proposed to form an interdisciplinary collaboration with both Professors Antonietti and Sanchez to combine their history of research, as individuals and together, of nano-scaled materials with structural hierarchy and green chemistry. Specifically, this is a 1-year project to direct electrospin a photocatalytic bilayer composite of anatase-TiO2 and TiOxNy. Studies will be performed to analyze the relationship between the precursor synthesis with direct electrospinning parameters, structural analysis of fiber formation, microstructure, composition, thermal properties and crystallization kinetics.
