Oil sands are a naturally occurring mixture of sand, water, and a form of petroleum called bitumen. They occur in many countries throughout the world, but Anthony is specifically working with our neighbors to the north in Alberta, Canada. Canada in particular has a large amount of oil sands and this project is leveraging some of our nanotechnology knowledge to tackle both the reduction of CO2 emissions and the treatment of the produced water that is generated during oil recovery from the oil sands. It is definitely a really interesting project and a neat example of some of the collaborations that happen at GE Global Research. We are partnering with both the University of Alberta and Alberta Innovates Technology Futures for the project; as well, the project is supported by the Climate Change and Emissions Management Corporation.

Anthony will be blogging about this project in the future but for the time being you can read more on the project here.

KBB Elementary was named after Dr. Katharine Burr Blodgett, the first female researcher at the General Electric Company. Dr. Blodgett had a Ph.D. in Physics from Cambridge University and was actually the first woman to have ever achieved this! She also is the first woman to have received the American Chemical Society Garvan Medal. Dr. Katharine Blodgett’s contributions to science are still extremely relevant today. She worked on monomolecular coatings to cover surfaces such as water, metal, and glass and is the inventor of low-reflectance “invisible glass”. Therefore anybody who wears glasses or enjoys seeing clearly out their car windshield should be sure to give a special thanks to Dr. Blodgett!

Giving thanks to Dr. Blodgett is exactly what the students at Katharine Burr Blodgett did on Monday morning.  June 13th is the official Katharine Burr Blodgett Day in the city of Schenectady. To celebrate this, the school put together a special program for the students, including songs, inspirational speeches, science demonstrations, and a special guest speech from Dr. Katharine Gebbie, the niece of Dr. Katharine Burr Blodgett. The transcription of Dr. Gebbie’s speech about her aunt is below, which includes some very personal and interesting information about Dr. Blodgett.

I wanted to share this transcription with you, as well as some video of Margaret and Azar showing some nanotechnology demonstrations to the students at KBB. The video also features the students at KBB singing their very own Beagles anthem. Enjoy!

The sign outside of KBB:

Azar Alizadeh shows off some of GE Global Research’s nanotechnology demos:

Margaret Blohm (left outside) and Dr. Azar Alizadeh (right outside) with Dr. Katharine Gebbie and her sister Margaret, the nieces of Katharine Blodgett:

Katharine Blodgett’s niece, Dr. Gebbie, looks on as Azar talks to the students of KBB:

Showing how “magic” is really science:

Dr. Katharine Gebbie’s speech to KBB students:

It would have meant a great deal to our aunt Katharine to know that a school named after her was making learning such an exciting adventure for all of you. She was the first woman to join the research staff at the General Electric Company, the first woman to get a Ph.D. in Physics from Cambridge University and the first woman to receive the American Chemical Society’s prestigious Gervan award.

But more importantly to us, she was our favorite aunt. And whenever she used to visit us, which was about 3 times a year, she would always arrive with two suitcases. One that contained her clothes and one that had a lot of apparatus.  She would invite the neighborhood children in to join us to actually come and see the experiments she was doing. And we just loved her.  She treated us with all the respect she treated adults and other members of our family. And when she visited us in July in the summer months, she insisted that we be allowed to stay up beyond our bedtimes so she could tell us about the constellations and point them all out.

Maybe that was why I eventually became an astronomer, because of those first visits with her.

But let me go back to when she was very young. Her father was the head of the patent department at General Electric and he was involved in dealing with a lot of the most important patents of Edison’s. He was also shot and killed by a murderer five weeks before Aunt Katharine was born and this is one of the famous unsolved murders of the last century in the United States. Before he died he said to Katherine’s mother, you must put the children in an orphanage and go and find another husband. But he didn’t know my grandmother. She spent the rest of her live and devoted the rest of her life to supporting and educating her children.

Aunt Katharine was very smart, much smarter than I am. When she was two she taught herself to read. And she also had very much of the New England work ethic. She never missed a day of school her mother told us. Even when she had her tonsils out, the day of the operation she had her mother take her to school for 2 hours so she wouldn’t break her record. That was the way it was.

My grandmother took her children to Europe when they were very small because she felt the education was both better and less expensive in Europe. And every Sunday she would take them to see a cousin of theirs was recovering from tuberculosis and the first time she went there as a little girl, Katharine Blodgett saw a swing and it was the very first swing she had seen in her whole life. And she went running to her mother and asked could she have permission to swing on the swing, and her mother, this woman who wore black her whole life, said “Katharine, do you think the Lord would want you to swing on a Sunday?” And Katharine told us this story and she didn’t think it was fair at all. She didn’t mind not being able to swing but she didn’t think it was fair to be asked to decide what the lord would want and anyways, she couldn’t see how he would mind.

So, she came to work at the General Electric and Irving Langmuir convinced her to go to Cambridge and work with a very famous Ernest Rutherford for her Ph.D. in physics. And I quite recently discovered the first draft of a publication she did for her research and it began with a draft with the acknowledgements and it began “The writer at this time would like to say that her supervisor at this time was the greatest fool that she had ever met and that Sir Ernest Rutherford ignored his students more than he should be allowed to do. ” And now that, was naturally, not published, but I just thought that maybe some of you have sometimes felt that way, not about any teachers here of course, but maybe just at some time.

I am interested in her legacy, particularly both her professional and her personal legacy. Professionally, because the work that she did is still being sited 60-70 years later and that is quite a tribute to a scientist that the work that they did is still important. And personally because her grandnieces and nephew still remember her very well and appreciate and loved her and they have told us that we cannot come back from this wonderful event and a picture of the sign of the school and some pictures you to show to them. So I thank you very much for this wonderful opportunity to meet all of you and have a talk with some of you afterwards and please have a wonderful day.

Our work was noted in the Conference highlights:

Gunther Portfolio
ScienceDirect

as well as in PHOTON International’s overview of the conference:

The EU PVSEC is a great conference, in fact apparently the largest PV conference in the world. If you want to learn more about PV in general, I recommend you attend the 24th installment in Hamburg this September:

Speaking of Spain (and quite coincidentally), GE’s work in Nanotechnology was recently highlighted in the Spanish magazine Muy Interesante, one of the most widely circulated popular science and technology magazines in the Spanish speaking world. Among the areas highlighted was Nano PV.

As you can see, there is a picture (courtesy of Muy Interesante magazine) of a research-scale silicon nanowire solar cell next to large-area conventional single crystal silicon PV modules. There is some time to go before we get nanostructured PV modules to that scale, but we continue to do research towards that goal. What’s not apparent from the picture is that in fact it was taken right in the beginning of the winter here in Upstate New York on the GE Global Research demonstration PV module installation, and it was freezing!! I had to take my coat on and off in between shots, and my hands were numb. Nevertheless, it was fun and it was great that the photographer was able to get a shot of the setting sun’s reflection right behind the nano solar cell. The article itself describes how GE is looking to use nanotechnology to improve photovoltaics, as well as other application areas.

Incidentally, if you would like to learn more about the use of nanostructures for PV, a review article on the topic can be found in the journal Materials Science and Engineering: Reports. Here is a link:

It describes how the various classes of nanostuctures are used for various PV applications. A more detailed analysis will be given by various experts in the field in a forthcoming book I am editing called Nanotechnology for Photovoltaics (Taylor & Francis/CRC Press, 2010), which is due out later this year.

Also, last week I attended the SPIE Optics & Photonics conference , in which the latest developments in the use of nanotechnology for PV were reported. I hope to be able to share some of the technical details in the future. Thank you for you for your interest and I look forward to any comments/feedback.

Did you know that a coal-fired power plant can produce almost 500 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) every hour?

The idea of capturing CO2 emissions from power plants and storing it in the ground is both easier and harder than you think.

It is easier because most of the technology needed to do it exists today. In fact, people have been putting CO2 into the ground to help recover oil for many years. However, it’s harder than you think because the technology is both expensive and isn’t widely used at the scale needed to capture and store CO2 from a typical power plant.

That’s where my team and I come in. We’ve been looking at ways of using the things we’ve learned from our Nanotechnology research program to reduce the cost of capturing CO2.

GE is investing heavily in cleaner coal, aka integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) technology, which allows precombustion CO2 capture . IGCC involves turning the coal into a synthesis gas and removing undesirable components such as sulfur and CO2 before burning it to produce electricity. The potential for cost savings comes from the fact that the gases are at high pressure and concentration, making them easier to separate.

Membranes are one of the technologies we’ve been working on. For those of you who aren’t familiar the concept, membranes are physical barriers that let some gases penetrate through them much faster than other gases. As you can see in the figure, the membranes we are developing have small holes that approach the size of the molecules. These pores tend to let smaller molecules through more rapidly. With proper nanoengineering of the molecular structure to favor selective adsorption and surface transport along the pore walls, we can also produce membranes that favor larger molecules over smaller ones. We are currently working in the lab on minimizing performance degradation over long periods of time as well as making membrane units large enough to handle CO2 at the scales produced by a power plant.

Check back here for occasional updates from our lab as we make progress on this important work. I’d also recommend our company Ecomagination site for the latest news on GE’s technologies for reducing emissions, utilizing renewable energy, making the electrical grid smarter, and eco-related activities.

In the following three videos, the contact angles of a stationary droplet on all three surfaces are ~150 degree. When an impacting droplet (with the same impact speed) hits on the surfaces, the droplet can either stay on the surface (video 1),

partially lift off the surface (video 2),

or totally bounce off the surface (video 3).

Look at the way the water droplet spreads, recoils, breaks into satellite droplets, and completely lifts off in video 3 – that’s what we really want for an impacting-droplet resistant surface! You might wonder what we can do with a cool thing like this? Imagine applications that involve high speed water droplets, such as wind turbine blade, airplane wing, or even just your car in motion. These are just a couple of the exciting possibilities that we are looking at.

Nanotechnology truly entered the national consciousness and public policy with the establishment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in 2000. A status report of the NNI observes that the years leading up to around 2005 were focused on fundamental research and ‘horizontal’ multi-disciplinary R&D with relevance to multiple application areas. The report predicts that the next few years will see a shift in focus to ‘vertical’ industrial areas.

Along a similar vein, a recent report [1] points out that nanotechnology represents a value chain and not an industry in itself. Thus nanotechnology is comparable to the interstate highway system and will add to the value proposition of all users that use the infrastructure. The report also postulates how nanotechnology could be exploited across industry value chains, from basic materials to intermediate products to final goods. The report presents separate forecasts by each value chain stage as well as by sector and region. In 2014, it projects that 4% of general manufactured goods, 50% of electronics and IT products, and 16% of goods in healthcare and life sciences by revenue will incorporate emerging nanotechnology. The report [1] predicts that nanotechnology’s growth will occur in phases. In the first phase, nanotechnology is being incorporated selectively into high-end products. In 2004 revenues from products incorporating emerging nanotechnology was about $13 billion, $8.5 billion of which lies in automotive and aerospace applications. The report predicts that from 2010 onwards, nanotechnology will become commonplace in manufactured goods, with revenues rising to $2.6 trillion in 2014. Healthcare and life sciences applications will finally become significant in this period as nano-enabled pharmaceuticals and medical devices emerge from lengthy human trials.

However, not all attempts to make this transition are likely to succeed. In particular, it is unlikely that nanomaterials will dramatically alter the nature of a product or lead to a new product if an entire value chain from nanomaterial to end product has to be developed, since the time to market would probably be too long or the return on investment too low. Success is most likely in those areas where suitably tailored nanomaterials can be integrated seamlessly into an existing value chain while simultaneously preserving the benefits of the nanoengineered property.

A key question that policymakers, technologists and corporations need to address is the nanomanufacturing infrastructure that is needed to enable such a value chain. It is most likely that such an infrastructure will only be established when it is catalyzed at the national or international level. Several government agencies in the US are recognizing the need to transition the advances in nanoscience into commercial applications. The Industrial Technology Program of the Department of Energy recently organized a Nanomanufacturing for Energy Efficiency workshop to address some of these issues [2]. The pace of establishment of such a nanomanufacturing infrastructure is likely to be the key determinant on the magnitude of impact nanotechnology has in our daily lives.

[1]: http://www.luxresearchinc.com/press/RELEASE_SizingReport.pdf

[2] : http://www.bcsmain.com/mlists/files/NanoWorkshop_report.pdf

I’ve written in the past that there are a pile of GE products that have thermal challenges, and our research teams have no shortage of ideas for new thermal technologies to solve these problems. Heat pipes are one such example. A heat pipe is a device that, on the outside, looks like a rod or bar of copper, but appears to have a thermal conductivity that is several times higher than that of copper. But the heat pipe is hollow and on the inside it passively creates a fluid recirculation loop. The fluid is evaporated at the hot end of the heat pipe, travels along its length, re-condenses and the cold end, and then the liquid travels back to the hot side to start the process over again. The liquid carries the heat from one end to the other, and can do so much more efficiently than mere conduction through the solid copper walls. Heat pipes are very common in today’s electronics. In fact, practically every laptop has one or more heat pipes to distribute heat from CPU’s and GPU’s to the heat sinks elsewhere in the laptop.

Meanwhile, the cooling needs of electronics continues to escalate, and existing heat pipes have some limits. In response to these trends, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, put out a request for teams to develop an advanced Thermal Ground Plane, which in essence is a high performance planar heat pipe. GE was one of the teams selected to attempt to develop such a device.

So here’s what we are going to build. First of interest is the form factor. Most heat pipes are literally pipes, say 6 mm in diameter and a few inches long. But DARPA wanted something that looks more like a circuit board in size and scale. So we are attempting to build a heat pipe that is only 1 mm thick, but is up to 20 cm long. This is very thin! Maintaining structural integrity will be very challenging.

The other big requirement is that this device needs to be able to operate at up to 20 g’s. Depending on orientation, the g-forces can impede and even halt the flow of the liquid in a regular heat pipe, thus stopping the operation of the heat pipe and driving the temperature of the electronics through the roof. There are ways to make heat pipes work at high g’s, but then one must severely de-rate the amount of heat the heat pipe can carry. A major innovation was required.

One of the key points of innovation for this project is to leverage some of our recent advancements in nanotechnology. By carefully inventing and constructing special nano-sized features in various regions of the TGP, we believe we are going to set records for heat fluxes at high g’s.

The other thing that makes this project very daunting, but very fun, is the wide range of disciplines needed to successfully create the TGP device. A great thing about the GE Global Research Center is that we have just about every type of technologist available. So it is true that some of my thermal experts are working on this project, but they constitute only a fraction of the technologists. We’ve got a team of experts on computational heat transfer methodologies building a new suite of models to predict the performance of our TGP devices. We have chemists who are experts at fabricating new material technologies, and engineers who have devoted their research over the last several years to nano-scale multi-phase heat transfer. And we have packaging experts who are extremely knowledgeable at selecting substrate materials, bonding the TGP packages together, even how to interface the electronics to these devices in the future. Plus we have the pleasure of teaming with the University of Cincinnati and the Air Force Research Lab. The result is a diverse, world-class team of scientists who are tackling a truly hard problem. But when we succeed, you will see our TGP in a wide range of GE’s electronics products!

I just have seen that GE.com features our recent work with tropical butterflies that we have published in Nature Photonics. We have discovered that nanostructures of butterfly wing scales selectively respond to different vapors. This selective response is observed as very stable slight changes in iridescent colors of butterfly wings.

Numerous times after our paper was published, I was asked how did I come up with this idea? It is simple and can be summarized in several key steps: (1) to know your field of research; (2) to understand clearly the unmet needs; (3) to know the solutions that were tried and worked in the past; (4) to be open to non-traditional, disruptive solutions; (5) to understand other scientific areas and imagine how the observations or solutions from those areas can be applied to your unmet need.

My concept of using scales of tropical butterflies for vapor sensing came from understanding the principles of photonic sensors. While these photonic sensors based on structural color can be more attractive that those based on organic dyes (organic dyes tend to photobleach), the unmet need in photonic sensors is their poor selectivity – one still needs to have an array of such sensors for more selective vapor detection. Accidentally, I came across an image of a tropical butterfly at a very high magnification where the details of butterfly wings were at the nanoscale range. It became clear to me that these features can be used for vapor sensing and we may be able to get more selective vapor responses because of the well-organized hierarchical nanostructure of the butterfly wing scale.

Overall, my approach surprisingly matches with a quote from Dave Grusin, composer and jazz musician, that I have seen on a paper coffee cup: ‘In my career I’ve found that ‘thinking outside the box’ works better if I know what’s ‘inside the box.”

Our research team studied vapor responses in great detail and characterized the butterfly scales with great nano-characterization tools we have at GE Global Research. Our corporate team did a great job explaining on GE web page the vapor-sensing concept and putting an animation together.

Approximately 95% of today’s commercial solar cells are based on crystalline Si (mean module efficiencies of 14-16%), yet they are relatively expensive (>$2.5/W). On the other hand, ~5% of the PV market is based on amorphous Si (a-Si) and other thin films, which promise lower cost (< $1/W) though generally with lower module efficiencies (4-10%). Silicon is not the ideal semiconducting material for solar energy conversion owing to its indirect band gap, which makes optical absorption inefficient. Yet Si is the material of choice in the PV industry today because it is the second most abundant element in the earth’s crust, making it a relatively inexpensive semiconductor. CdTe and Cu(In,Ga)(Se,S)2 (CIGS) are also promising thin film technologies with demonstrated module efficiencies greater than 10%.

The above discussion highlights three key question facing the PV field: 1) how can the efficiency of solar cells be increased to competitive levels with other energy sources?; 2) how can the cost of solar cells be decreased to a level suitable first for secondary and ultimately for primary power generation?; 3) how can both of these goals be achieved in a single solar cell device and related manufacturing process? The SAI program seeks to address these questions by developing low cost manufacturing processes using the above classes of materials and structures.

Given the ongoing developments in nanotechnology, it was logical for us to consider whether we can apply such structures to PV. Specifically, we asked ourselves: can nanotechnology be used to address either of the above three questions, and if so, how?

A review of the technical literature shows that various classes of nanostructures have been explored for photovoltaics. These are classified as: (a) nanocomposites & nanostructured materials, (b) quantum wells, (c) nanowires & nanotubes, (d) nanoparticles & quantum dots. Each type of nanostructure has been implemented in various schemes and each has advantages and disadvantages. In our work, for example, we have shown that the optical properties of nanowire arrays are significantly better than those of solid thin films (see article published in the Journal of Nanophotonics) and could thus be used in new solar cell configurations. The work is ongoing, and it is very exciting to be involved in this relatively new and growing field. I will give you updates on the progress of our work from time to time.

Self-assembly is a promising method to achieve controlled nanoscale architectures in hybrid materials and ceramics. To date, surfactants and block copolymers have been used as templates to synthesize nanoporous oxides and nanostructured non-oxide ceramics via the controlled addition of ceramic precursors. The manufacture of ordered nanostructured ceramics, whereby the block copolymer intrinsically serves as both template and ceramic precursor, is rather rare and highly desired. At GE Global Research, we have synthesized a novel polymer and discovered a process that achieves this goal and enables the synthesis of orderered non-oxide ceramics with exquisite morphological control down to the nanometer scale via self-assembly.

The process begins with the exploitation of two very recent advances in polymer and ceramic synthesis. Innovations in catalysis and polymer derived ceramics by Grubbs (Caltech) and Sneddon (UPENN) respectively have enabled us to synthesize novel block copolymers based on polynorbornene and decaborane in which ring opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) is exploited to make well-defined block copolymers that readily self-assemble into highly ordered nanostructures upon solvent evaporation of cast solutions.

We have discovered an interesting solvent dependence on morphology in these systems, in which block copolymer cast from different solvents lead to different mophologies such as lamellar and cylindrical (polynorbornene-decaborane matrix and polynorbornene cylinders). Although these solvent effects on block copolymer morphology are not new, in our system, they may enable different applications such as structural ceramics for instance.

These ordered hybrid polymeric materials are the precursors to ordered nano-structured non-oxide ceramics. For example, pyrolysis of lamellar ordered hybrid block copolymer in argon leads to a layered ceramic nanocomposite of boron carbide and carbon.

Alternatively, pyrolysis of ordered hybrid block copolymer with a cylindrical morphology in ammonia yields highly ordered, mesoporous boron nitride having 20 nm diameter pores and surface areas ranging from as high as 950 m2/g.

These mesoporous ceramics show great promise as a new class of catalyst support materials where as the layered structures pave the way towards ordered nanocomposites that may be used as the foundational building blocks in hierarchical ceramic materials with outstanding mechanical properties, much akin to natural ceramic systems such as seashells.

For more details on this work, check out the article in Nature Nanotechnology.

Welcome to my Nanotech blog at GE Global Research. So the obvious question you might have is what does Nano mean for a company like GE?

At GE, we think of Nano not as a product by itself, but as an enabling technology, the ultimate material science, the ability to control and exploit unique properties exhibited by materials at the nanometer length scales. Nano is the technology that will enable our light bulbs to be more efficient, our aircraft engines to be lighter, faster, and stronger, our plastics to be more conductive, our diagnostic imaging agents to be more sensitive and specific, and the list goes on and on… Nanotechnology gives GE the opportunity to create a revolutionary change in our existing materials to improve our products as well as create new products.

At Global Research, we have a significant effort in the area of nanotechnology led by Dr. Margaret Blohm. The nanotechnology program is comprised of five platforms, namely: nanotubes/nanorods, nanoparticles, nanoceramics, nano structured metals, and nano patterned surfaces. Every platform is focused on understanding material properties at the nano length scales and building structure-property relationships for various applications.

You have already seen some blogs on our nanopatterned superhydrophobic surfaces. I would like to kick off this blog on our nanoparticles platform.

Nanoparticles technology is one of the most mature areas within nanotechnology. Fumed or colloidal silica and carbon black are nanoparticles that have been around in products for a few decades. What has changed over the last decade is that we can now build nanoparticles of a variety of compositions by synthesizing particles, sometimes from their atoms up, with a lot more control. We also have sophisticated tools that allow us to characterize and explore nanoparticles in the 1 – 100 nm scale. The nanoparticles technology efforts at GE span a wide range of applications from ferrofluids to electronic materials to hardcoats to medical imaging agents.

The video here (click on the picture at left) shows a commercially available magnetic fluid composed of ~ 100 nm iron oxide nanoparticles being pulled by a strong magnet. Such a magnetic fluid has applications as a lubricant in moving parts. If we go to an order of magnitude lower, to ~5-10 nm diameter, the iron oxide particles become superparamagnetic and can be used as magnetic resonance imaging agents to better visualize tissue in human body. Superparamagnetic iron based particles for medical imaging is an active area of research within the nanoparticles platform at GRC.

Enjoy the video and stay tuned for more on nanoparticles on this blog…