The Growth of Materials Science Research at UH
Above: Isabella Kotsol, a mechanical engineering PhD student, performs air filtration tests to remove sulfur dioxide pollutants from the air using activated carbon
IN MEDIEVAL TIMES, ALCHEMY WAS A PROTOSCIENTIFIC PRACTICE that sought to transform base metals into gold and to create an elixir of immortality. While the search for eternal life continues on, today’s scientists are now able to understand and perfect materials in ways that would make the ancient alchemists marvel in wonder and amazement.
For the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UH Mānoa), the origins of its materials science effort today can be traced to a research unit with a name that would be befitting of a branch at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) — the Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology (HIGP). Known outside of UH Mānoa more by its individual centers, including the Hawai‘i Space Flight Laboratory, which has developed NASA-funded technology development projects with its Spectral Technology Group and Raman Spectroscopy Laboratory, including the Hyperspectral Thermal Imager and Thermal Infrared Compact Imaging Spectrometer that have been successfully launched into orbit aboard nanosatellites to measure the chemical composition of gases, rocks and soils.
While the primary mission of HIGP is to invent technologies and improve techniques for exploring Earth and planets from a composition standpoint, the knowledge, equipment and laboratories that help to facilitate this research have been adapted to study and improve material properties on the ground for use in multiple applications across various industries.
“HIGP has a long history of developing instrumentation to study the chemical and physical properties of materials that go back to the days of our high-pressure minerals physics group that simulated the chemical composition of the Earth’s interior to study minerals under extreme conditions,” said HIGP Director Robert Wright. “As a result, our work in material properties and processing, combined with our advanced instrumentation, enables a wide range of materials science research and education to be conducted at UH Mānoa.”
Materials Science Consortium for Research and Education (MSCoRE)
Recognizing the growing importance of materials science research, the UH Mānoa launched a strategic initiative known as the Materials Science Consortium for Research and Education (MSCoRE) in 2017. The goal was to bring together materials experts and infrastructure scattered around several colleges and departments under one group in support of education, innovation, and to lay the foundation for a future materials science center at UH Mānoa.
Przemyslaw Dera, a professor of mineral physics and extreme materials science at HIGP, was one of the original members involved on the ground floor of MSCoRE. A chemist by trade, who usually applies his knowledge to study planetary interiors, Dera was selected to form a core group of engineers, chemists, and renewable energy experts that understood materials.
“There are a lot of people like me at UH Mānoa, including physicists, engineers, and chemists whose work can be defined as materials research,” said Dera. “MSCoRE brought us together and marked the beginning of a more coordinated effort to combine different areas of research expertise to create completely new materials that will outperform existing ones.”
Under MSCoRE, UH Mānoa was able to develop a popular research experience class for undergraduates and became quite successful in obtaining grants to bolster its materials science program. One of its early successes was a U.S. Department of Energy grant to study hydrogen storage materials, led by Professor Craig Jensen of the Department of Chemistry. Awarded through the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the grant helped UH Mānoa contribute to this growing field.
Materials Research and Education Consortium (MRE-C)
Utilizing this momentum, researchers from UH Mānoa and the University of Washington (UW) received a seed award from the NSF’s Partnerships for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) program in 2021. The collaboration, known as the Materials Research and Education Consortium (MRE-C), is made up of seven UH Mānoa faculty from HIGP, the Hawai‘i Natural Energy Institute (HNEI) and the Colleges of Engineering and Social Sciences, as well as 10 faculty from the UW Molecular Engineering Materials Center. MRE-C conducts public school visits around the islands to increase student interest and participation in materials science and STEM, and facilitates student exchanges at the undergraduate and graduate levels between UH Mānoa and UW. The grant was recently renewed by NSF for a full six years at $4.2 million.
“This partnership maximizes the complementary expertise and resources at both schools, while emphasizing education, training and workforce development,” said HIGP Assistant Researcher Godwin Severa, who serves as the program’s principal investigator. “At the same time, it benefits our research by developing foundational knowledge about advanced nano-to-macroscale materials and the properties controlling their unique behaviors, and assessing their viability in future energy and space technologies.”
Hawai‘i Institute of Materials Research (HIMaR)
As a testament to UH Mānoa’s expanding capacity and expertise in this space, the Office of Naval Research just awarded a three-year, $4.5 million grant to conduct innovative, high-risk scientific research with the potential to enhance naval capabilities and national security in the Indo-Pacific region. Together with the NSF PREM grant, UH Mānoa will now have a formal structure in place with the establishment of the Hawai‘i Institute of Materials Research (HIMaR). Co-led by Dera, Severa, Jensen and Professor Joseph Brown from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, HIMaR will be a virtual, interdisciplinary institute of applied and fundamental research in materials science, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and advanced manufacturing.
“Engineering is a natural part of materials science and in many ways, materials sciences is motivated by engineering applications,” said Dera. “By creating new inks for their 3D printers, we learn not only how to use the printers in novel ways, but we also learn how to make the engineering component out of the inks to perform better — there is a natural synergy there.”
In addition to funding for 14 PhD level positions, HIMaR will be investing in state-of-the-art equipment, including an advanced high spatial resolution laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy microscope to detect changes in chemistry or physical properties in heterogenous materials; a Raman spectrometer coupled to an atomic force microscope to provide chemical and molecular identification at nanoscale; and a plasma etcher to fabricate micro circuits that will be located in the clean room at the UH Mānoa College of Engineering to bolster their efforts in the Advanced Manufacturing Initiative (see related story).
“Large scale manufacturing is clearly not compatible in Hawai‘i due to our limited land area and expensive workforce,” said Dera. “However, by establishing small-scale capabilities to manufacture critical components for existing industry and our military forces, we can create a new workforce and develop another leg of the economy to increase our island resiliency.”