CLOSE
Tags Posts tagged with "Brookhaven National Laboratory"

Brookhaven National Laboratory

by -
0 4910
Alex Orlov on the campus of the University of Cambridge. Photo by Nathan Pitt, University of Cambridge

By Daniel Dunaief

The Ukranian-born Alex Orlov, who is an associate professor of materials science and chemical engineering at Stony Brook University, helps officials in a delicate balancing act.

Orlov, who is a member of the US-EU working group on Risk Assessment of Nanomaterials, helps measure, monitor and understand the hazards associated with nanoparticles, which regulatory bodies then compare to the benefit these particles have in consumer products.

“My research, which is highlighted by the European Union Commission, demonstrated that under certain conditions, [specific] nanoparticles might not be safe,” Orlov said via Skype from Cambridge, England, where he has been a visiting professor for the past four summers. For carbon nanotubes, which are used in products ranging from sports equipment to vehicles and batteries, those conditions include exposure to humidity and sunlight.

“Instead of banning and restricting their production” they can be reformulated to make them safer, he said.

Orlov described how chemical companies are conducting research to enhance the safety of their products. Globally, nanotechnology has become a growing industry, as electronics and drug companies search for ways to benefit from different physical properties that exist on a small scale. Long Island has become a focal point for research in this arena, particularly at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials and the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Alex Orlov on the campus of the University of Cambridge. Photo by Nathan Pitt, University of Cambridge

Indeed, Orlov is working at the University of Cambridge to facilitate partnerships between researchers in the chemistry departments of the two universities, while benefiting from the facilities at BNL. “We exchange some new materials between Cambridge and Stony Brook,” he said. “We use BNL to test those materials.”

BNL is an “essential facility,” Orlov said, and is where the postdoctoral student in his lab and the five graduate students spend 30 to 60 percent of their time. The data he and his team collect can help reduce risks related to the release of nanomaterials and create safer products, he suggested.

“Most hazardous materials on Earth can be handled in a safe way,” Orlov said. “Most scientific progress and environmental protection can be merged together. Understanding the environmental impact of new technologies and reducing their risks to the environment should be at the core of scientific and technological progress.”

According to Orlov, the European Union spends more money on technological safety than the United States. European regulations, however, affect American companies, especially those that export products to companies in the European Union.

Orlov has studied how quickly toxic materials might be released in the environment under different conditions.

“What we do in our lab is put numbers” on the amount of a substance released, he said, which informs a more quantitative understanding of the risks posed by a product. Regulators seek a balance between scientific progress and industrial development in the face of uncertainty related to new technologies.

As policy makers consider the economics of regulations, they weigh the estimated cost against that value. For example, if the cost of implementing a water treatment measure is $3 million and the cost of a human life is $7 million, it’s more economical to create a water treatment plan.

Orlov teaches a course in environmental engineering. “These are the types of things I discuss with students,” he said. “For them, it’s eye opening. They are engineers. They don’t deal with economics.”

In his own research, Orlov recently published an article in which he analyzed the potential use of concrete to remove pollutants like sulfur dioxide from the air. While concrete is the biggest material people produce by weight and volume, most of it is wasted when a building gets demolished. “What we discovered,” said Orlov, who published his work in the Journal of Chemical Engineering, “is that if you take this concrete and expose new surfaces, it takes in pollutants again.”

Fotis Sotiropoulos, the dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SBU, said Orlov has added to the understanding of the potential benefits of using concrete to remove pollutants.

Other researchers have worked only with carbon dioxide, and there is “incomplete and/or even nonexistent data for other pollutants,” Sotiropoulos explained in an email. Orlov’s research could be helpful for city planners especially for end-of-life building demolition, Sotiropoulous continued. Manufacturers could take concrete from an old, crushed building and pass waste through this concrete in smokestacks.

To be sure, the production of concrete itself is energy intensive and generates pollutants like carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. “It’s not the case that concrete would take as much [pollutants] out of the air as was emitted during production,” Orlov said. On balance, however, recycled concrete could prove useful not only in reducing waste but also in removing pollutants from the air.

Orlov urged an increase in the recycling of concrete, which varies in the amount that’s recycled. He has collaborated on other projects, such as using small amounts of gold to separate water, producing hydrogen that could be used in fuel cells.

“The research showed a promising way to produce clean hydrogen from water,” Sotiropoulos said.

As for his work at Cambridge, Orlov appreciates the value the scientists in the United Kingdom place on their collaboration with their Long Island partners.

“Cambridge faculty from disciplines ranging from archeology to chemistry are aware of the SBU/BNL faculty members and their research,” Orlov said. A resident of Smithtown, Orlov has been on Long Island for eight years. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking and exploring new areas. As for his work, Orlov hopes his work helps regulators make informed decisions that protect consumers while making scientific and technological advances possible.

by -
0 1840
From left, scientist Lin Yang at the LiX beamline demonstrates how the beam hits the sample to high school teachers James Ripka, Mary Kroll, Fred Feraco, Janet Kaczmarek and Jocelyn Handley-Pendleton. Photo from BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

He helped build it and now a range of researchers are coming.

Lin Yang helped create the LiX beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is attracting researchers eager to study the fine structure and function of everything from proteins to steel.

The lead scientist for the LiX beamline at the NSLS-II at BNL, Yang was the control account manager for the construction of the beamline and was the spokesperson for a team that wrote the original beamline development proposal.

“In our case, the scattering from the sample is sensitive to the underlying structure” of materials, Yang said. “That’s why people want to use scattering to study their samples.”

Like the other beamlines at the NSLS-II, the LiX enables scientists to use sophisticated equipment to search for links between structures and function. Each beamline has a three-letter acronym. In the case of LiX, the “Li” stands for life sciences, while the “X” represents X-ray scattering.

When they designed the beamline, LiX researchers were seeking optics that were capable of producing a beam to conform to the specifications required for different types of measurements. They then designed an experimental station that is suitable for handling biological samples. Specifically, that involved developing an automated sample handler for measurements on protein molecules in solution.

“With atomic resolution structures and functional assays, we do get new insights [about] important ions such as calcium,” which are involved in signaling and physiology, Qun Liu, a principal investigator in the Biology Department at BNL, described in an email. “LiX will be essential to allow us [to see] the transport process in real time and space.” Liu wrote that Yang is an “outstanding X-ray beamline scientist” who is also well known for his pioneering work on membrane diffraction.

The ability to perform measurements using a beam of a few microns is “pretty unique right now,” which also attracted researchers working with steel samples, Yang said. “When we designed the instrument, our focus [was] on the biological structure” but the beamline is “versatile enough” that it has found other uses, Yang said.

Researchers working with steel realized that the same diffraction-based approach to finding underlying structures in living tissue could also shed light on the structures of their samples.

In everyday life, diffraction is visible from the wavelengths of light that form the hologram on a credit card. Scientists working with steel have been applying for time on the LiX beamline, too, creating a competitive environment for researchers working in both fields.

Lynne Ecker, the deputy department chair in the Nuclear Science and Technology Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, has used the beamline to study the effect of neutrons and ions on steel.

“Ions will only damage steel so far,” Ecker said. The LiX is “perfect” to study the degree of the damage. Ecker said she’s tried this kind of analysis in other places, but the LiX provides better spatial resolution. The LiX scientists are working on improving the degree of automation for sample handling and data processing.

“We are about to install a six-axis robot, which is typically seen in industrial automation, to help realize unattended overnight measurements on protein solution samples,” Yang said. The robot is already at the facility and Yang and his team will be installing the support structure to mount the robot in the experimental station this month. “The more challenging task is to put the software in place so that the beamline can control the robot,” he explained in an email.

The LiX beamline uses lenses made from beryllium, which are transparent to X-rays. For X-rays at the wavelength of about one angstrom, about 93 percent can pass through about a millimeter of beryllium. That compares favorably to aluminum, which allows about 2 percent to pass through at the same thickness.

The LiX beamline can run at 500 frames per second, which produces a wealth of data. In practice, it may take up to a second for the detector to accumulate enough signal from the sample. Still, the beamline can generate enough data that the experimenter may not be able to examine it frame by frame, which makes automated data processing more important.

Scientists have used the beamline to explore the structure of plants. These researchers mainly want to understand how materials like cellulose are organized within different parts of the plant and in different plants.

In bones, researchers can differentiate between organic matter like collagen and inorganic matter. Not only can they determine where they are, but they can also explore their orientation in a sample. Bones are easy samples since collagen and minerals in bone have distinctive scattering and diffraction patterns, Yang said. Researchers “like to look at how biological molecules change their shape as they interact with their functional partners,” Yang said.

A resident of East Setauket, Yang lives with his wife Mian Wang, who is an architect in Farmingdale, and their two daughters. A fan of tennis, Yang plays as often as he can during the summer at the Three Village Tennis Club.

Yang grew up in Yunnan province in the southwest of China. Trained as a physicist, Yang picked up knowledge of molecular biology from his years of working with other scientists. In his work, he gets to combine his talents in engineering, programming and molecular biology.

“We learn new things when we interact with our users/guest researchers since we first need to learn about their problems before we can help solve them,” he described in an email. Yang hopes the research he and the team at the LiX support will result in high-impact publications. “As more researchers know about us and our capabilities, I expect more people will want to perform experiments at our beamline,” he said.

by -
0 2502
Standing near one of the X-ray scattering instruments, Kevin Yager holds a collection of samples, including a self-assembling polymer film. Photo courtesy of BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

Throw a batch of LEGOs in a closed container and shake it up. When the lid is opened, the LEGOs will likely be spread out randomly across the container, with pieces facing different directions. Chances are few, if any, of the pieces will stick together. Attaching strong magnets to those pieces could change the result, with some of the LEGOs binding together. On a much smaller scale and with pieces made from other parts, this is what researchers who study the world of self-assembled materials do.

Scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials and at the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory experiment with small parts that will come together in particular ways based on their energy landscapes through a process called self-assembly.

Every so often, however, a combination of steps will alter the pathway through the energy landscape, causing molecules to end up in a different final configuration. For many scientists, these so-called nonequilibrium states are a nuisance.

Above, Kevin Yager listens to sonified data. When data is sonified, it is translated into sound. Photo by Margaret Schedel

For Kevin Yager, they are an opportunity. A group leader at the CFN who works closely with the NSLS-II, the McGill University-educated Yager wants to understand how the order of these steps can change the final self-assembled product. “In the energy landscape, you have these peaks and valleys and you can take advantage of that to move into a particular state you want,” Yager said. “The high level goal is that, if we understand the fundamentals well enough, we can have a set of design rules for any structure we can dream up.”

At the CFN, Yager manages a nanofabrication facility that uses electron-beam lithography and other techniques to make nanostructures. He would like to fabricate model batteries to show the power of nanomaterials. He is also determined to understand the rules of the road in the self-assembly process, creating the equivalent of an instruction manual for miniature parts.

In future years, this awareness of nonequilibrium self-assembly may lead to revolutionary innovations, enabling the manufacture of parts for electronics, drugs to treat disease and deliver medicine to specific locations in a cell and monitors for the detection of traces of radioactivity or toxins in the environment, among many other possibilities.

Yager’s colleagues saw considerable opportunities for advancement from his work. Nonequilibrium self-assembly has “significant potential for a broad range of nanodevices and materials due to its ability to create complex structures with ease,” Oleg Gang, a group leader in Soft and Bio Nanomaterials at the CFN, explained in an email. Yager is an “excellent scientist” who produces “outstanding results.”

One of the things Yager hopes his research can develop is a way to “trick self-assembly into making structures they don’t natively want to make” by using the order of steps to control the final result.

As an example, Yager said he developed a sequence of steps in which nanoscale cylinders pack hexagonal lattices into a plane. These lattices tend to point in random directions as the cylinders form. By following several steps, including sheer aligning a plane and then thermal processing, the cylinders flip from horizontal to vertical as they inherit the alignment of the sheered surface. Flipping these cylinders, in turn, causes the hexagons all to point in the same direction. When Yager conducted these steps in a different order, he produced a different structure.

Broadly speaking, Yager is working on stacking self-assembling layers. In his case, however, the layers aren’t like turkey and swiss cheese on a sandwich, in which the order is irrelevant to the desired final product. Each layer has a hand in directing the way the subsequent layers stack themselves. Choosing the sequence in which he stacks the materials controls their structure.

Yager is working with Esther Takeuchi and Amy Marschilok at Stony Brook University to develop an understanding of the nanostructure of batteries. Gang suggested that Yager’s expertise is “invaluable for many scientists who are coming to the CFN to characterize nanomaterials using synchtrotron methods. In many cases, it would probably be impossible to achieve such quantitative understanding without [Yager’s] input.”

Yager and his wife Margaret Schedel, an associate professor in the Department of Music at Stony Brook University who is a cellist and a composer, live in East Setauket. The couple combined their talents when they sought ways to turn the data produced by the CFN, the NSLS and the NSLS-II into sound.

Scientists typically convert their information into visual images, but there’s “no reason we can’t do that with sound,” Yager said. “When you listen to data, you sometimes pick up features you wouldn’t have seen.”

One of the benefits of turning the data into sound is that researchers can work on something else and listen to the collection of data in the background, he said. If anything unexpected happens, or there is a problem with a sample or piece of equipment, they might hear it and take measures more rapidly to correct the process. “This started as a fun collaboration,” Yager said, “but it is useful.”

Schedel is working on sonifying penguin data as well. She also sonified wave data on Long Island. “By listening to the tides quickly, larger patterns emerge,” she said, adding that Yager thought the idea was theoretically interesting until he listened to misaligned data and then he recognized its benefit.

Schedel’s goal is to see this sonification effort spread from one beamline to all of them and then to the Fermilab near Chicago and elsewhere. She wants sonification to become “an ear worm in the science community.”

While Schedel introduced Yager to the world of sound in his research, he introduced her to sailing, an activity he enjoyed while growing up in the suburbs of Montreal. When she sails with him, they are “half in and half out of the boat,” Schedel said. It’s like two people “flying a kite, but you are the kite. You have to learn how to counterbalance” the boat. They hike out so they can take turns faster without tipping over, she said.

by -
0 2058
HXN team members, from left, Evgeny Nazaretski, Ken Lauer, Sebastian Kalbfleisch, Xiaojing Huang, Yong Chu, Nathalie Bouet and Hanfei Yan. Photo courtesy of BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

There’s precision in measurements and then there’s the world of Yong Chu. The head of a beamline that’s housed off to the side in a separate, concrete structure from similar efforts at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Chu led the design, construction and commissioning of a sophisticated beamline with a resolution of as low as 3 nanometers, which he hopes will get down to 1 nanometer within a year.

Just as a measure of contrast, a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide. Why so fine a resolution? For starters, seeing objects or processes at that high level can offer insights into how they function, how to improve their manufacture or how to counteract the effects of harmful processes.

With a battery, for example, the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe, or HXN beamline, could help reveal structural weaknesses in the nanostructure that could cause safety issues. In biology, numerous functions involve sub-cellular organelles that respond to proteins. Proteins are typically smaller than the HXN beamline can image, although researchers can tag the proteins with metals, which allows Chu, his colleagues and visiting scientists to see an aggregate of these proteins.

The HXN beamline can also help explore environmental problems, such as how plants transport harmful nanoparticles to their fruits or how artificial compounds absorb nuclear waste. Imaging beamlines that use micro-focused beams typically offer spatial resolution of 10 microns, 1 micron or even 100 nanometers, according to Ryan Tappero, the head scientist at the X-ray Fluorescence Microprobe at BNL, who has used the HXN for his research. Using the NSLS II source properties and a new x-ray optics development routinely offers resolution of 10 nanometers, which pushes the spatial resolution down by another factor of 10, which makes the HXN, according to Tappero, a “game changer.”

Tappero described Chu as a “rock star” and suggested he was an “exceptional beamline scientist” who is “very knowledgeable about X-ray optics.”

BNL houses 19 beamlines at the National Synchrotron Light Source II, a state-of-the-art facility large enough that scientists ride adult tricycles inside it to travel from one beamline to another and to transport supplies around the facility. BNL is building another nine beamlines that it hopes to have operational within the next 18 months. Each of these beamlines offers a different way to explore the world of matter. Some beamlines do not use a focused beam, while others produce beams with high angular or high energy resolution. Imaging beamlines such as the HXN produce a small beam size.

The HXN beamline has the highest spatial resolution of any beamline at the NSLS-II. Scientists building the HXN grew a nanofocusing lens with a dedicated deposition system that was constructed at the NSLS-II Research and Development lab. The system grew a nanofocusing lens a layer at a time, alternating materials and controlling the thickness at better than 1 nanometer, Chu explained.

The beamline where Chu works has padded walls, a door separating it from the rest of the light source and a monitor that records the temperature to the thousandths of a degree. “We are constantly monitoring the temperature around the X-ray microscope and inside of the X-ray microscope chamber,” he said. Around the microscope, he can keep the temperature stable within 0.03 degree Celsius. In the chamber, the scientists maintain the temperature at better than 0.003 degree Celsius.

So, now that Chu and his colleagues built their beamline, have the scientists come? Indeed, the interest in using the HXN has been well above the available time slots. For the three cycles each year, BNL receives about four requests for each available time. This reflects the unique qualities of the instrument, Chu said, adding that he doesn’t expect the rate to drop considerably, even as the HXN continues to operate, because of the ongoing demand.

Researchers have to go through a peer review process, where their ideas are graded for the likelihood of success and for the opportunity to learn from the experiments. All beam time proposals are reviewed by external expert panels, which examine the scientific merit, appropriateness of use of the facility, capability of proposers and quality of prior performance and the research plan and technical feasibility.

Chu fields about 10 calls per month from scientists who want to speak with him about the feasibility of their ideas. He may suggest another station at the NSLS-II or at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, where he was a beamline scientist starting in 1999.

“I know many of the beamlines” at the Advanced Photon Source, he said. “I recommend some of the potential users to perform experiments at the APS first before coming to the HXN.” By the time scientists arrive at his beamline, Chu said he’s gotten to know them through numerous discussions. He considers them “as a guest” at the HXN hotel. “We try to make sure the experimental needs for the users are met as much as possible,” he said.

The HXN beamline has three staff scientists and two postdoctoral fellows who remain in contact with scientists who use the facility. “For most of the users, at least one of us is working throughout the weekends and late evenings,” said Chu.

Not just a staff scientist, Chu is also a user of the HXN, with currently one active general user proposal through a peer review process in which he is collaborating with Stony Brook University and BNL scientist Esther Takeuchi to explore the nanostructure of metal atoms during phase separation in batteries.

Chu and his wife Youngkyu Park, who works at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a research investigator in basic and preclinical cancer research, live in Northport. The couple’s 22-year-old son Luke is attending Nassau Community College and is planning to transfer to Stony Brook this fall to study engineering. Their daughter Joyce is 18 and is enrolled in the Parsons School of Design in New York.

Chu grew up in Seoul, South Korea, and came to the United States when he was 18. He attended Caltech. While Chu’s parents wanted him to become a doctor, he was more inspired by a cartoon called Astro Boy, in which a scientist, Dr. Tenma, is a hero solving problems. As for the work of the scientists who visit his beamline, Chu said the “success of individual users is the success of the beamline.”

by -
0 412
Percy Zahl. Photo courtesy of BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

When he was in high school in Negenborn, Germany, Percy Zahl built his own computer, with some help from one of his father’s friends. Nowadays, Zahl spends considerable time improving the computer capability of an open-source community drive software project that helps researchers see structures and interactions at a subatomic level.

Recently, Zahl, who is an associate scientist in the Proximal Probe Microscopy facility at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory, completed an extensive upgrade to software called Gnome X Scanning Microscopy, or GXSM, that adds a whole suite of new features. Zahl re-coded about half of the original 300,000 lines of code during this project.

The software, which is used to operate any kind of scanning probe microscopy system which includes atomic force microscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy, has a wide range of applications, from understanding catalysts that facilitate chemical reactions, to capturing gases, to biomedical sensors.

Oliver Monti, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a professor of physics at the University of Arizona, has been working with Zahl for over four years and has been using this system to explore atomic and molecular-scale processes that determine efficiency in plastic solar cells and other next-generation low-energy-use technologies. He said he uses the GXSM for data analysis.

Zahl “often introduces modifications and upgrades as instantaneous response to some scientific need,” which has “helped us solve specific problems efficiently,” Monti explained in an email. A former student of Monti’s needed to analyze molecule-to-molecule interactions. The two came up with an algorithm to study that and, unprompted, Zahl “introduced a version of this algorithm to his software.”

Percy Zahl (front of line) during a Tour of Somerville race in 2011. Photo by Anthony Skorochod.

Monti said he is “very much aware of the most recent release,” which he considers a “major upgrade” and he is in the process of installing it. The new software allows the export of images in formats such as PDF and SVG, which are editable and resolution independent, Zahl explained. A PDF output of a graph has publication quality, while the images with high-resolution displays are enhanced and sharper than the previous bitmap PNG files.

The upgrade also includes making a remote control process for automating scanning and manipulation tasks “easy to use,” which is a “big plus for less experienced users,” Zahl explained. It can help automate complex or tedious repetitive jobs. As an example, Zahl said the need to scan an image that takes 10 minutes each for 20 different settings creates a laborious task. “I can either sit there and enter manually a new number every 10 minutes” or he can program a script that he made to use a list of bias voltages and hit execute in the new remote console, he explained, leaving him time to work on other projects for the next two hours and 20 minutes.

Recently, Zahl ran a spectra covering the area of a molecule, which is a task he can do reliably without worrying about user typos or errors. An additional noncontact atomic force microscopy simulation plug-in module provides researchers with a more efficient way to generate data. The new approach measures the force between atoms and molecules of the surface of a sample and a probe smaller than the diameter of an atom. Zahl has calculated and simulated forces between atoms, taking into account all atoms of a molecule and the probe atom and finds the equilibrium position of his probe. Using that three-dimensional force field, he can extract an image that he compares to the model.

Zahl spends about three quarters of his time working with users like Monti, while he dedicates the remaining time to his own projects. He appreciates the opportunity to work with many different systems and with people in a wide range of scientific disciplines.

“It’s really as diverse as it can get in this particular field of fundamental surface science — a specialty of solid state physics,” Zahl explained in an email. He has the experience to work with many different sample types while still continuing to learn “all the tricks on how to get the best images possible.”

Monti appreciates Zahl’s dedication to his work. “Data processing and analysis can be challenging,” he explained. His students often compare a trip to BNL to drinking from a firehose.

Zahl has been “essential in helping us figure out how to sift through the data and quickly focus on the most important observations,” Monti added. That appreciation extends well beyond Monti’s lab. “Whenever I meet colleagues across the world who had the pleasure to interact with [Zahl], they lavish praise on his scientific and technical expertise,” Monti said.

Bruce Koel, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton University, appreciated Zahl’s contribution to his research on chemical reactions at surfaces. Zahl has “enabled us to do very high impact research,” Koel explained in an email. This work would “not have been possible without [Zahl’s] technical support and guidance about what experiments could be done.”

A resident of Rocky Point, Zahl rides the 20 miles to work as often as he can on one of several of his bicycles. An avid cyclist, Zahl has a high-end racing bike, a commuter bike and a mountain bike from those “beloved times” riding mountain trails in Switzerland.

In Chile, he reached a top speed of around 56 miles per hour descending the Osorno Volcano. In a YouTube video of his ride, he can be seen passing a car in a clearing along the windy road.

As for his work, Zahl remains committed to continuing to improve the software scientists use to enhance their visual understanding of the small surfaces of the substances they study. “I am pretty much always working on some new details or fixing this and that tiny issue,” he said. “No software is ever done. It’s evolving.”

by -
0 553
Jun Wang in her laboratory with a transmission x-ray microscope. Photo from BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

The first time is most definitely not the charm. That’s what Jun Wang and her colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory discovered about sodium ion batteries.

Wang, a physicist and lead scientist at the facility, looked deep into the inner workings of a sodium ion battery to determine what causes structural defects as the battery functions. As it turns out, the first time a sodium ion battery charges and discharges, it develops changes in the microstructure and chemical composition of iron sulfide. These changes, which degrade the performance of the battery, are irreversible during the first charging cycle.

“We found that the cracks happened during the first cycle, then, after that, the structure kind of reached equilibrium,” said Wang, who published her research in the journal Advanced Energy Materials. “All these changes happen during the first cycle.”

Collaborators from Brookhaven’s Photon Sciences and Sustainable Energy Technologies groups stand behind the new transmission x-ray microscope (TXM) at BNL’s National Synchrotron Light Source. From left: Yu-chen Karen Chen-Wiegart, Can Erdonmez, Jun Wang (team leader), and Christopher Eng. Photo from BNL

Sodium ion batteries are considered an alternative to lithium ion batteries, which are typically found in most consumer electronics. Like lithium, sodium is an alkali metal, which means that it is in the same group in the periodic table. Sodium, however, is more abundant and, as a result, considerably less expensive than lithium.

Using a synchrotron-based hard X-ray full-field microscope, Wang was able to see what happened when sodium ions moved into and out of an iron sulfide electrode through 10 cycles. “We can see this microstructure evolution,” she said.

Wang monitored the evolution as a function of time while the battery is charging and discharging. The results are the first time anyone has studied a sodium-metal sulfide battery with these tools, which provides information that isn’t available through other methods. “It is challenging to prepare a working sodium ion battery for the in operandi/in situ TXM study to correlate the microstructural evolution with its electrochemical performance,” she said.

Other researchers suggested that Wang has developed a following in the scientific community for her ground-breaking research. “She has a very good reputation in the area of X-ray nanotomography, applied to a wide range of different materials,” Scott Barnett, a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, explained in an email. “I am most familiar with her work on fuel cell and battery electrodes — I think it is fair to say that this work has been some of the best pioneering research in this area,” he said.

Barnett, who started collaborating with Wang in 2010 on measuring fuel cell and battery electrodes with X-ray tomography, suggested that Wang’s work on capacity loss “could certainly lead to new breakthroughs in improved batteries.”

In her most recent work with sodium ion batteries, Wang found that the defects start at the surface of the iron sulfide particles and move inward toward the core, Wang said. The microstructure changes during the first cycle and is more severe during sodiation. The particles don’t return to their original volume and shape. After the first cycle, the particles reach a structural equilibrium with no further significant morphological changes, she said.

In other cycles, the material does not show further significant morphological changes, reach a structural equilibrium and electrochemical reversibility. Wang and her colleagues confirmed these observations with X-ray nanotomography, which creates a three-dimensional image of the battery material while recording the change in volume.

Wang suggested that a way to reduce these structural defects could be to reduce the size of the iron sulfide particles to create a one-phase reaction. She will work with other collaborators on modeling and simulations that will enhance the design of future battery materials.

In addition to conducting research on batteries, Wang is an industrial program coordinator in the Photon Science Directorate at BNL. She works with industrial researchers and beamline staff to find and explore new opportunities in industrial applications using synchrotron radiation. She leads the industrial research program, interacting with user groups through consultation, collaboration and outreach.

To manage her research, which includes a lab of three other researchers, and to accomplish her mission as manager of an industrial research program, Wang jokes that she “spends 100 percent of her time” with each responsibility. “I try to do my best for the different things” she needs to do with her time, she said.

Jun Wang with her husband Qun Shen and their 11-year old son Sam in Waikiki last year. Photo from Jun Wang

A native of Wuhu, China, Wang earned her bachelor’s degree in physics from Anhui University in China and her doctorate in physics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. She worked at the Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility, which was the first synchrotron light source in China. During her doctoral training, she studied multilayer films using X-ray diffraction and scattering.

A resident of Poquott, Wang is married to Qun Shen, who is the deputy director for science at the NSLS-II. The couple has an 11-year-old son, Sam, who is a sixth-grade student at Setauket Elementary School. Shen and Wang met at an international X-ray crystallography conference in the early 1990s.

Shen trained in the United States after he graduated from Beijing University in 1980, when he went to Purdue University for his doctorate through the China-US Physica Examination and Application Program. The couple have worked together a few times over the years, including publishing a paper in Nature Communications. Wang is hoping that her work with battery research will lead to improvements in the manufacture and design of sodium ion batteries.

by -
0 2159
Line Pouchard at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2013. Photo by Allan Miller

By Daniel Dunaief

They produce so much information that they can’t keep up with it. They use the latest technology to gather data. Somewhere, hidden inside the numbers, might be the answer to current questions as well as the clues that lead to future questions researchers don’t know how to ask yet.

Scientists in almost every facility, including at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Stony Brook University, are producing information at an unprecedented rate. The Center for Data-Driven Discovery at Brookhaven National Laboratory can help interpret and make sense of all that information.

Senior researcher Line Pouchard joined BNL’s data team early this year, after a career that included 15 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (another Department of Energy facility) and more than two-and-a-half years at Purdue University. “The collaborations at the [DOE] lab are highly effective,” she said. “They have a common purpose and a common structure for the scientist.” Pouchard’s efforts will involve working with metadata, which adds annotations to provide context and a history of a file, and machine learning, which explores large blocks of information for patterns. “As science grows and the facility grows, we are creating more data,” she said.

Scientists can share large quantities of information, passing files through various computer systems. “You may want to know how this data has been created, what the computer applications or codes are that have been used, who developed it and who the authors are,” she said.

Knowing where the information originated can help the researchers determine whether to trust the content and the way it came together, although there are other requirements to ensure that scientists can trust the data. If the metadata and documentation are done properly “this can tell you how you can use it and what kind of applications and programs you can use to continue working with it,” Pouchard said. Working in the Computational Science Initiative, Pouchard will divide her time between responding to requests for assistance and conducting her own research.

“At Purdue, [Pouchard] was quite adept at educating others in understanding metadata, and the growing interest and emphasis on big data in particular,” explained Jean-Pierre Herubel, a professor of library science at Purdue, in an email. Herubel and Pouchard were on the research council committee, and worked together with other members to shepherd their research agendas for the Purdue University library faculty.

Pouchard “has a capacity to participate well with colleagues; regarding national and international venues, she will be a strong participating member,” Herubel continued. “She does well working and integrating with others.”

Pouchard recently joined a team that submitted a proposal in the area of earth science and data preservation. She has also worked on something called the Semantic Web. The idea, which was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, is to allow the use of data items and natural language concepts in machine readable and machine actionable forms. As an example, this could include generating rules for computers that direct the machines to handle the multiple meanings of a word.

One use of the Semantic Web is through searches, which allows people to look for information and data and, once they’re collected, gives them a chance to sort through them. Combined with other technologies, the Semantic Web can allow machines to do the equivalent of searching through enormous troves of haystacks.

“When I first started talking about the Semantic Web, I was at Oak Ridge in the early days,” Pouchard said. Since then, there has been considerable progress, and the work and effort have received more support from scientists.

Pouchard was recently asked to “work with ontologies [a Semantic Web technology] in a proposal,” she said, which suggests they are getting more traction. She is looking forward to collaborating with several scientists at BNL, including Kerstin Kleese van Dam, the director of the Computational Sciences Initiative and the interim director of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery.

Kleese van Dam has “an incredible vision of what is needed in science in order to improve computational science,” said Pouchard, who met the director about a decade ago when van Dam was working in England. Pouchard has an interest in data repositories, which she explored when she worked at Purdue University.

Living temporarily in Wading River, Pouchard bought a home in Rocky Point and hopes to move in soon. Her partner Allan Miller, from Knoxville, Tennessee, owned and managed the Disc Exchange in Knoxville for 26 years. He is starting to help small business owners and non-profit organizations with advertising needs. Pouchard experienced Long Island when she was conducting her Ph.D. research at the City University of New York and took time out to visit a friend who lived in Port Jefferson.

When she’s not working on the computer, Pouchard, who is originally from Normandy, France, enjoys scuba diving, which she has done in the Caribbean, in Hawaii, in Mexico and a host of other places.

When Pouchard was young, she visited with her grandparents during the summer at the beach in Normandy, in the town of Barneville-Carteret. Her parents, and others in the area, lectured their children never to go near or touch metal objects they found in the dunes because unexploded World War II devices were still occasionally found in remote areas. The environment on Long Island, with the marshes, reminds her of her visits years ago.

Pouchard has an M.S. in information science from the University of Tennessee and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the City University of New York.

As for her work, Pouchard said she is “really interested in the Computational Science Initiative at BNL, which enables researchers to collaborate. Computational science is an integral part of the facilities,” at her new research home.

by -
0 487

By Daniel Dunaief

First responders, soldiers or those exposed to any kind of chemical weapons attack need a way to remove the gas from the air. While masks with activated carbon have been effective, the latest technological breakthrough involving a metal organic framework may not only remove the gas, but it could also disarm and decompose it.

That’s the recent finding from research led by Anatoly Frenkel in a study on a substance that simulates the action of sarin nerve gas.

Frenkel, who is a senior chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering at Stony Brook University, worked with metal organic frameworks, which contain zirconium cluster nodes that are connected through a lattice of organic linkages.

Anatoly Frenkel with his son, Yoni, at Lake Hopatcong in New Jersey. Photo by Mikhail Loutsenko.

These structures would “do the job even without any catalytic activity,” Frenkel said, because they are porous and capture gases as they pass through them. “It’s like a sponge that can take in moisture. Its high porosity was already an asset.”

Frenkel and his colleagues, which include John Morris and Diego Troya from Virginia Tech, Wesley Gordon from Edgewood Chemical Biological Center and Craig Hill from Emory University, among other contributors, suspected that these frameworks might also decompose the gas.

Theoretically, researchers had predicted this might be the case, although they had no proof. Frenkel and his team used a differential method to see what was left in the structure after the gas passed through. Their studies demonstrated a high density of electrons near the zirconium atoms. “These were like bread crumbs congregated around a place where the zirconium nodes with the connecting linkers were,” Frenkel said.

While this work, which the scientists published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, has implications for protecting soldiers or civilians in the event of a chemical weapons attack, Frenkel and his colleagues, who received funding from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, can share their results with the public and scientific community because they are not working on classified materials and they used a substance that’s similar to a nerve gas and not sarin or any other potentially lethal gas.

“This knowledge can be transferred to classified research,” Frenkel said. “This is a stepping stone.” Indeed, Frenkel can envision the creation of a mask that includes a metal organic framework that removes deadly nerve gases from the air and, at the same time, disarms the gas, providing a defense for first responders or the military after a chemical weapons attack. Even though he doesn’t work in this arena, Frenkel also described how manufacturers might use these frameworks in treating the fabric that is used to make clothing that can prevent gases that can be harmful to the skin from making contact.

A physicist by training, Frenkel’s work, which includes collaborations on five other grants, has a common theme: He explores the relationship between structure and function, particularly in the world of nanomaterials, where smaller materials with large surface areas have applications in a range of industries, from storing and transmitting energy to delivering drugs or pharmaceuticals to a targeted site.

Eric Stach, a group leader in electron microscopy at BNL, has collaborated with Frenkel and suggested that his colleague has helped “develop all these approaches for characterizing these materials.” Stach said that Frenkel has “an outstanding reputation internationally” as an expert in X-ray absorption spectroscopy, and, in particular, a subarea that allows scientists to learn about extremely subtle changes in the distance between atoms when they are subjected to reactive environments.

Frenkel said some of the next steps in the work with metal organic frameworks include understanding how these materials might become saturated with decomposed gas after they perform their catalytic function. “It’s not clear what can affect saturation,” he said, and that is something that “needs to be systematically investigated.” After the catalyst reaches saturation, it would also be helpful to know whether it’s possible to remove the remaining compound and reuse the catalyst.

“The next question is whether to discard” the framework after it’s trapped and deactivated the chemicals or regenerate it, Frenkel said. He is also exploring how temperature ranges might affect the performance of the framework. Ideally, it would function as well in an arctic environment as it would in a desert under extreme heat. A commercial application might require the synthesis of a material with different physical characteristics for a range of temperature conditions.

Frenkel has been working on this project for about one and a half years. A colleague approached him to become a part of this new collaboration. “My role was to bring this work to a national lab setting,” where the scientists could use the advanced tools at BNL to study the material as it was working, he said.

A resident of Great Neck, Frenkel, who grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, lives with his wife Hope Chafiian, a teacher at the Spence School in Manhattan for almost 30 years. He has three children: Yoni lives in Manhattan and works at JP Morgan Chase, Ariela is a student at Binghampton and Sophie is in middle school in Great Neck.

Frenkel appreciates the opportunity to explore the broader world of nanomaterials, which, he said, are not constrained by crystal structures and can be synthesized by design. “They show a lot of mysteries that are not understood fully,” he said. Indeed, Frenkel explained that there are numerous commercial processes that might benefit from design studies conducted by scientists. As for his work with metal organic frameworks, he said “there’s no way to overestimate how important [it is] to do work that has a practical application that improves technology, saves costs, protects the environment” and/or has the potential to save lives.

by -
0 2161
From left, outgoing Secretary of the Department of Energy Ernest Moniz with BNL Laboratory Director Doon Gibbs taken at the opening of the National Synchrotron Light Source II at BNL. Photo courtesy of BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

Before Ernest Moniz ends his tenure as Secretary of the Department of Energy, he and his department released the first annual report on the state of the 17 national laboratories, which include Brookhaven National Laboratory.

On a recent conference call with reporters, Moniz described the labs as a “vital set of scientific organizations” that are “critical” for the department and the country’s missions. Experts from the labs have served as a resource for oil spills, gas leaks and nuclear reactor problems, including the meltdown at Fukushima in 2011 that was triggered by a deadly tsunami. “They are a resource on call,” Moniz said.

In addition to providing an overview of the benefit and contribution of the labs as a whole, the annual report also offered a look at each of the labs, while highlighting a research finding and a translational technology that has or will reach the market. In its outline of BNL, the report heralded an “exciting new chapter of discovery” triggered by the completion of the National Synchrotron Light Source II, a facility that allows researchers at BNL and those around the world who visit the user facility to explore a material’s properties and functions with an incredibly fine resolution and sensitivity.

Indeed, scientists are already exploring minute inner workings of a battery as it is operating, while they are also exploring the structure of materials that could become a part of new technology. The DOE chose to shine a spotlight on the work Ralf Seidl, a physicist from the RIKEN-BNL Research Center, has done with several collaborators to study a question best suited for answers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

Seidl and his colleagues are exploring what gives protons their spin, which can affect its optical, electrical and magnetic characteristics. The source of that spin, which researchers describe not in terms of a top spinning on a table but rather as an intrinsic and measurable form of angular momentum, was a mystery.

Up until the 1980s, researchers believed three subatomic particles inside the proton created its spin. These quarks, however, only account for a third of the spin. Using RHIC, however, scientists were able to collide protons that were all spinning in a certain direction when they smash into each other. They compared the results to protons colliding when their spins are in opposite directions.

More recently, Seidl and his colleagues, using higher energy collisions, have been able to see the role the gluons, which are smaller and hold quarks together, play in a proton’s spin. The gluons hadn’t received much attention until the last 20 years, after experiments at CERN, in Geneva, demonstrated a lower contribution from quarks. “We have some strong evidence that gluons play a role,” Seidl said from Japan, where he’s working as a part of an international collaboration dedicated to understanding spin.

Smaller and more abundant than quarks, gluons are like termites in the Serengeti desert in Africa: They are hard to see but, collectively, play an important role. In the same report, the DOE also celebrated BNL’s work with fuel cell catalysts. A senior chemist at BNL, Radoslav Adzic developed a cheaper, more effective nanocatalyst for fuel cell vehicles. Catalysts for fuel cells use platinum, which is expensive and fragile. Over the last decade, Adzic and his collaborators have developed a one-atom-thick platinum coating over cheaper metals like palladium. Working with BNL staff scientists Jia Wang, Miomir Vukmirovic and Kotaro Sasaki, he developed the synthesis for this catalyst and worked to understand its potential use.

N.E. Chemcat Corporation has licensed the design and manufacturing process of a catalyst that can be used to make fuel cells as a part of a zero-emission car. This catalyst has the ultra low platinum content of about two to five grams per car, Adzic said. Working at BNL enabled partnerships that facilitated these efforts, he said. “There is expertise in various areas and aspects of the behavior of catalysts that is available at the same place,” Adzic observed. “The efficiency of research is much more convenient.”

Adzic, who has been at BNL for 24 years, said he has been able to make basic and applied research discoveries through his work at the national lab. He has 16 patents for these various catalysts, and he hopes some of them will get licensed. Adzic hopes this report, and the spotlight on his and other research efforts, will inspire politicians and decision makers to understand the possibility of direct energy conversion. “There are great advances in fuel cell development,” Adzic said. “It’s at the point in time where we have to do some finishing work to get a huge benefit for the environment.”

At the same time, the efficiency of fuel-cell-powered vehicles increases their economic benefit for consumers. The efficiency of an internal combustion engine is about 15 percent, whereas a fuel cell has about 60 percent efficiency, Adzic said.

BNL’s Laboratory Director Doon Gibbs welcomed the DOE publication. “This report highlights the remarkable achievements over the past decade of our national lab system — one that is unparalleled in the world,” he said. Gibbs suggested that the advanced details in the report, including the recognition for the NSLS II, span the breadth of BNL’s work. “They’re just a snapshot of what we do every day to make the world a better place,” Gibbs said.

While the annual report is one of Moniz’s final acts as the secretary of the agency, he hopes to communicate the vitality and importance of these labs and their work to the next administration.“I will be talking more with secretary nominee [Richard] Perry about the labs again as a critical jewel and resource,” Moniz said. “There’s a lot of support in Congress.” Moniz said the DOE has had five or six lab days, where labs share various displays with members of the legislative body. Those showcases have been “well-received” and he “fully expects the labs to be vital to the department.”

by -
0 638
Shinjae Yoo with his son Erum

By Daniel Dunaief

He works with clouds, solar radiation and nanoparticles, just to name a few. The subjects Shinjae Yoo, a computational scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, tackles span a broad range of arenas, primarily because his focus is using large pieces of information and making sense of them.

Yoo helps refine and make sense of searches. He develops big data streaming algorithms that can apply to any domain where data scalability issues arise. Integrating text analysis with social network analysis, Yoo did his doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also earned a master’s degree, on creating systems that helped prioritize these electronic messages.

“If you are [traveling and] in the airport, before you get into your plane, you want to check your email and you don’t have much time,” he said. While this isn’t the main research work he is doing at the lab, this is the type of application for his work. Yoo developed his technical background on machine learning when he was at Carnegie Mellon. He said he continues to learn, improve and develop machine learning methods in various science domains. By using a statistical method that combines computational science skills, statistics and applied math, he can offer a comprehensive and, in some cases, rapid analysis of information.

Colleagues and collaborators suggested Yoo has made an impact with his work in a wide range of fields. His “contribution is not only in the academic field, but also means a lot on the industrial and academic field,” Hao Huang, a machine learning scientist at GE Global Research, wrote in an email. “He always focuses on making good use of data mining and machine learning theory on real world [areas] such as biology, renewable energy and [in the] material science domain.”

Yoo explained how a plant biologist can do stress conditioning for a plant with one goal in mind. That scientist can collect data over the course of 20 years and then they can “crunch the data, but they can’t always analyze it,” which might be too unwieldy for a bench scientist to handle. Using research from numerous experiments, scientists can study the data, which can provide a new hypothesis. Exploring the information in greater detail, and with increased samples, can also lead to suggestions for the best way to design future experiments.

Yoo said he can come to the scientist and use machine learning to help “solve their science data problem,” giving the researchers a clearer understanding of the broad range of information they collected. “Nowadays, generated data is very easy,” but understanding and interpreting that information presents bigger challenges. Take the National Synchrotron Light Source II at BNL. The $912 million facility, which went live online earlier this year, holds considerable promise for future research. It can look at the molecules in a battery as the battery is functioning, offering a better understanding of why some batteries last considerably longer than others. It can also offer a look at the molecular intermediaries in biochemical reactions, offering a clearer and detailed picture of the steps in processes that might have relevance for disease, drug interactions or even the creation of biological products like shells. He usually helps automate data analytics or bring new hypotheses to scientists, Yoo said. One of the many challenges in experiments at facilities like the NSLS II and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, also at BNL, is managing the enormous flow of information that comes through these experiments.

Indeed, at the CFN, the transmission electron microscopy generates 3 gigabytes per second for the image stream. Using streaming analysis, he can provide an approximate understanding of the information. Yoo received a $1.9 million, three-year Advanced Scientific Computer Research grant this year. The grant is a joint proposal for which Yoo is the principal investigator. This grant, which launched this September, is about high-performance computing enabled machine learning for spatio-temporal data analysis. The primary application, he said, is in climate. He plans to extend it to other data later, including, possibly for NSLS II experiments.

Yoo finds collaborators through emails, phone calls, seminars or anywhere he meets other researchers. Huang, who started working with Yoo in 2010 when Huang was a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook, appreciates Yoo’s passion for his work. Yoo is “dedicated to his research,” Huang explained. “When we [ran] our proposed methods and got results that [were] better than any of the existing work, he was never satisfied and [was] always trying to further explore to get even better performance.”

When he works with collaborators in many disparate fields, he has found that the fundamental data analysis methodologies are similar. He needs to do some customization and varied preprocessing steps. There are also domain-specific terms. When Yoo came to BNL seven years ago, some of his scientific colleagues around the country were not eager to embrace his approach to sorting and understanding large pools of data. Now, he said other researchers have heard about machine learning and what artificial intelligence can do and they are eager to “apply those methods and publish new papers.”

Born and raised in South Korea, Yoo is married to Hayan Lee, who earned her PhD at Stony Brook and studies computational biology and specializes in genome assembly. They have a four-year old son, Erum. Yoo calls his son “his great joy” and said he “gives me a lot of happiness. Hanging around my son is a great gift.”

When Yoo was entering college in South Korea, he said his father, who had worked at the National Institute of Forest Science, played an important role. After his father consulted with people about different fields, he suggested Yoo choose computer science over chemistry, which would have been his first choice. “He concluded that computer science would be a new field that would have a great future, which is true, and I appreciate my dad’s suggestion,” Yoo said.

Prev1...131415Next Page 14 of 15
TBR News Media is your local news and entertainment website.
We provide you with the latest breaking news and information for your community.
Contact us: [email protected]

Most Viewed

©