A greener future

At a time when the world runs on gas and oil, the Photonics & Energy Research Lab (PERL) is looking to the future with its innovative and green ways to collect energy.

Over the course of the last year, PERL has published several papers on modern fields of chemistry under the guidance of Mohammed J. Uddin, an assistant professor of chemistry.

Uddin said he started with just one graduate student, and three undergrads in 2015, and now has four and eight, respectively, with a team consisting of 12 students. He said PERL has obtained four external grants, two from the Department of Defense (DOD), one from the National Science Foundation (NSF), one from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and some “internal state funds.”

“So, since then, we are working in developing a research group in a laboratory here,” Uddin said. “Our administration gave us really good space, so we bought several hundred thousands of dollars’ worth of instruments to carry out our research.”

He said he is grateful for the support of PERL from the department, college and university and that the credit goes to the entire community.

Uddin said that recently, one of their interesting results was published in Nano Energy, a journal with an impact factor of 14, showing its significance in the scientific community.

“We are really happy to have this kind of research result from our lab,” he said. “Since then, we’ve published around 14 research papers since 2015 and we published one patent. And we submitted two patents with our research results.”

Uddin also mentioned a paper by a recent graduate on photocatalysis, which resulted in “self-cleaning” tech. The graduate now works at ScanTech.

“We’ve developed a technology we’re going to apply to our fabrics that you do not need to wash your fabric, never,” he said. “It’s safe. For example, the chemical developed, you can even eat it. It is non-toxic, biocompatible and edible.”

Isaac Martinez, a chemistry senior and research assistant in PERL, also had a part in this paper, explaining the project as a “functional fabric.”

Martinez said the project was more than just clothes you could wear, and that it had “powers.”

“So, it had three functions,” he said. “It was stain mineralizing, so if you spilled, like, wine on it, we tried it with methylene blue, and Congo red, two dyes. It would essentially mineralize it, and, like, turn it into a powder to brush off eventually. … So, it would, like, clean itself. Also, it was antibacterial, so the titanium dioxide, because of its nature, it’s able to interfere with the membranes of bacteria and cause them to rupture and die. And finally, it was UV protective.”

Martinez said that besides this, they are working on several other projects in their lab, such as solar cell research.

“We’re trying to increase the efficiency of organic solar cells by tapering or tuning the different types of photons that can be absorbed by utilizing these things called quantum dots,” he said. “Also, we’re utilizing our carbo nanotubes to make our solar cells flexible, and applications where they would need flexibility, such as clothes or devices that aren’t flat.”

Martinez said the lab is also working on conductive cotton fabric, where whenever you stress them out, they produce electricity. For the average college student, he said the movement from walking around throughout the day could possibly charge your phone or power a digital watch from the energy created.

“You’d just be creating energy and then, you’d store it and then, you would use the energy you stored whenever you needed it,” Martinez said.

Asked what excites him about this type of research, Uddin replied, “I would say, the mission of the scientific community, nowadays, [is] to make green material and green energy. So, we are working to produce some safe and sustainable energy for the future.”

Martinez said he hopes to achieve a future that has transitioned to green energy.

“Through our projects, you can see that we’re not just trying to get energy from, like, mainstream sources that you hear about, like, the sun,” he said. “But, we’re really trying to harness energy from every little tiny source that we can get it from and, hopefully, that research inspires smarter, greener technologies that we can use every single day that can possibly get us off fossil fuels, single-use plastics, and [give us] just a greener, more sustainable future.”