News

Three-Minute Thesis Competition won by HPMI researcher

Of the 10 finalists of the FSU Three-Minute Thesis Competition, two participants – Margaret Scheiner and Aniket Ingrole – were HPMI researchers, with Aniket Ingrole taking home the top honor.

http://news.fsu.edu/More-FSU-News/Engineering-doctoral-student-wins-Three-Minute-Thesis-competition

HPMI Researcher paper receives Honorable Mention in IIE Transactions

HPMI PI Dr. Abhishek Shrivastava paper on “Efficient construction of split-plot design catalogs using graphs” received an Honorable Mention in the IIE Transactions Focused Issue on Quality & Reliability Engineering Best Paper Award Competition for 2015.

Dr. Shrivastava presented his paper this summer at the IIE Annual Conference and Expo in Nashville, TN. The paper discussed how fractional factorial split-plot designs are useful variants of the traditional fractional factorial designs. They incorporate practical constraints on the randomization of experiment runs. Catalogs of split-plot designs are useful to practitioners as they provide a means of selecting the best design suitable for their task. However, the construction of these catalogs is computationally challenging as it requires comparing designs for isomorphism, usually in a large collection. His paper present an efficient approach for constructing these catalogs by transforming the design isomorphism problem to a graph isomorphism problem. He provide new graph representations of split-plot designs to achieve this. He also showed, using examples, how these graph representations can be extended to certain other classes of factorial designs, for solving the (corresponding) design isomorphism problem. The paper reported on efficiency demonstrated by this approach by presenting catalogs of 2-level regular fractional factorial split-plot designs of up to 4096 runs, which is much larger than available in existing literature.

At the same conference, he also presented a paper “Enabling dimensional quality control of nanorod arrays.” This paper reported on nanotechnology that is concerned with manipulating material structure at the nanoscale is expected to transform most products as we know today. Several nanoscale materials, with wide ranging applications, have been invented. However, most nanotechnology products are still confined to laboratories, because the production processes have not attained the requisite maturity for scale up to commercial manufacturing. Scaling-up requires engineering the process for production, improving repeatability and reproducibility through variance reduction. Quality engineering tools, such as process optimization and statistical quality control, have a long history of helping achieve such goals, especially in manufacturing. However, these methods depend on accurate, precise and robust measurements of the quality characteristics. In the case of nanomaterials, key characteristics are size and spatial arrangement of nanostructures, as the forces and interactions of nanostructures depends on these. A key bottleneck to nanomanufacturing scale-up is the lack of tools to measure the size and spatial arrangement of nanostructures, accurately and precisely in a cost effective manner. In this talk, we will present our research on solving this critical problem for nanorod arrays. Dr. Shrivastava presented statistics-driven solutions to automate the process of estimating nanorod array geometry from electron micrographs.

HPMI Researcher awarded SME scholarship

HPMI Researcher and IME PhD candidate Margaret Scheiner was awarded the E. Wayne Kay Graduate Scholarship from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.

Applicants for the scholarship must be a full-time student with a minimum 3.0 GPA, who has been accepted in a graduate program for a Masters or Doctorate degree with a manufacturing or industrial engineering emphasis in the United States or Canada. Her selection was based upon scholastic ability, exemplary character and leadership capability, and potential for future leadership in the profession.

Margaret recently founded and serves as president of DreamOn, a student organization which aims to address the gender bias in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. She was inspired to become an engineer because she identified with STEM role models. Through DreamOn, she wants to bring role models to current students. “Every student has the potential to introduce new creativity to the world and to solve world-wide problems: they are tomorrow’s innovators,” she said.

 Margaret is currently coordinating the activities of 14 interns supported by the National Science Foundation and Air Force Research Lab Research Experience for Undergraduates, who are working at the High-Performance Materials Institute. In line with her DreamOn goals, of the interns, five are female. Margaret is also an alumnus of the NSF REU program.

She said that her desire to protect the outdoors and the environment led her to pursue the development of renewable energy sources. The summer after her freshman year at Cornell University, she worked at the Ames Laboratory, funded by the Department of Energy, where she hand-manufactured dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs), tested them, and analyzed the data. The team she worked with published a manuscript in Langmuir showing doubled solar conversion efficiency with a prescribed set of surface treatments.

Now, as a PhD candidate in Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering, she is working to develop and characterize methods to manufacture self-healing composite materials utilizing DSC sensors.

After graduate school, she intends to pursue a career in academia as a research professor. In this role, she believes she will continue to conduct research in advanced composites with a focus on bio-inspired healing abilities. In addition, she wants to inspire students in the classroom, in the laboratory, and via local STEM outreach.

TA Instruments Workshop on Theory and Applications of Rheology and Dynamic Mechanical Analysis

Cover article by HPMI research team

The November issue of physica status solidi (rapid research letters) features a back cover article by an HPMI research team.

“A high efficiency 3D photovoltaic microwire with carbon nanotubes (CNT)–quantum dot (QD) hybrid interface” was written by Dr. M. J. Uddin, Deborah E. Daramola, Ever Velasquez, Dr. Tarik J. Dickens, Jin Yan, Emily Hammel, Federico Cesano, and Dr. Okenwa I. Okoli.

The article discusses an innovative hybrid quantum-dot sensitized photo¬voltaic carbon-nanotubes microyarn developed by the HPMI team using thermally stable and highly conductive carbon-nanotube yarns (CNYs). These three-dimensional photovoltaic cells show 5.93% photon-to-energy conversion efficiencies under standard AM 1.5 light intensity with high structural flexibility. The CNYs are highly inter-aligned, ultrastrong and flexible with excellent electrical conductivity, mechanical integrity and catalytic properties. The CNYs are coated with a quantum-dots (CdSe/CdS) incorporated TiO2 microfilm and intertwined with a second set of CNYs as the counter electrode. These cells are capable of efficiently harvesting incident photons regardless of direction and generating photocurrents with high efficiency and operational stability. This flexible 3D PV wire could potentially be woven into engineering textiles or reinforced fabrics for smart applications.

The article can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pssr.v8.11/issuetoc .