#materials chemistry

[chemcurie]

7.1.26

9/100 Days of Productivity

I spent a while today working in the cleanroom. It was a hectic day, and of course the nitrogen tanks were out, they were out of other essentials, so I spent 45 minutes just running around getting stuff set-up. I'm having difficulty getting my surfaces to functionalize, so I'm attempting to reoxidize them. I used piranha solution for the first time today and it was so nerve-wracking. I tried functionalizing my sample and I'll see tomorrow if it's working again.

On the other hand I'm trying to purify a substituent for a catalyst, and we have an auto column, but it's been having a lot of issues, and today it didn't even fully fill each tube in the fraction collector. This stupid thing is genuinely the worst piece of equipment I've ever dealt with.

[scienceguy22]

The Beverly Hillbillies, but make it battery-grade.

An Ontario, Canada, real estate developer & entrepreneur bought an abandoned Union Carbide site in Welland, Ontario, & accidentally discovered a multi-billion dollar synthetic graphite stockpile. Excavations revealed 340,000 tonnes of high-grade synthetic graphite. At market prices up to USD 20,000/tonne, the stockpile could be worth $6.8 billion. This is important for a couple of reasons. The first is that China controls over 90% of the world's anode-grade graphite supply. China's export restrictions have made Western automakers desperate for non-Chinese sources. Charest's find is one of the largest known synthetic graphite stockpiles in North America, already validated for battery use. As such, demand is projected to double from 5.4M tonnes (2025) to 10.1M tonnes in 2030.

You might think batteries only require lithium; however, that is only the cathode (where electrons arrive) part of the battery. The anode (where electrons leave), the other half of the battery, is almost entirely graphite. Every EV battery uses 10x more graphite than lithium by weight. The graphite must be ultra-pure, spheroidized & micronized—a specialty process China dominates. That's why Charest's discovery is so important because it's not just graphite he found but synthetic-grade graphite, the hardest type to source. Union Carbide is historically known for extremely high-purity synthetic carbon. Graphite is almost entirely pure carbon. This is the writing source of pencils, not lead. When you write, you're literally shearing off tiny sheets of carbon that stick to the paper. Graphite is useful in batteries because it is open enough for lithium ions to slip between the layers & stable enough to survive thousands of charge cycles.

[catsi]

surfaces and interface chemistry final exam question: describe a phenomena seen in nanoparticles/thin films but not in bulk amounts of the same material. why does this occur?

girl obsessed with surface plasmon resonance: omg this would be such a good time for me to talk about surface plasmon resonance

[crisis-vision]

i am once again not ready for my materials chem midterm 🤓

[genuinebluff]

Baby's First Materials Chemistry Set | Let's Make: Table Salt

Set Includes:

Silly Sodium, Captain Chlorine, Beaker Buddy, and for a limited time: FunFlame! The Kid-Friendly Lighter

GenuineBluff.com

[materialsworld]

Sustainable alternative to rare earths

Recovered pieces part of car catalytic converter containing platinum, rhodium, palladium. 

A new iron catalysed reaction could prove to be an inexpensive, abundant and sustainable alternative to rare earth metals for more affordable medicines. A research team at the University of Huddersfield, UK, developed the chemical reaction using an ion catalyst, as it is cheaper and more readily available than traditional catalyst metals such as rhodium, palladium or iridium. 

Project leader, Professor Joe Sweeney, told Materials World, ‘To create the reaction, we combine sustainable chemical feedstock derived from plant-based materials such as corn crops. We then take these starch materials made from the corn and treat them with the ion-catalyst at five parts per 100, which creates complex carbon atoms we can capture to create an asymmetric centre. It is a very efficient process, as we form two bonds rather than one. We start from sustainable materials and also use a sustainable catalyst. Having developed the chemical reaction, the team is testing the compounds with partner Sweeney noting, ‘Any activity we do observe, we will go back and optimise.’

[chemcurie]

6.18.26

3/100 Days of Productivity

I'm working on new fluorescent monomers. The type of polymerization I work with is (I think) blocking access to bulky monomers, which all fluorescent ones are, causing them to not incorporate. I also cut some more wafer and functionalized them, and tried a new polymerization. I'm not feeling great about it, but I can try my best I guess. I'll characterize them tomorrow.

[chemcurie]

6.30.26

8/100 Days of Productivity

I've mainly been working on a presentation covering megalibraries in in materials chemistry. I don't really understand perovskites too much since I do work with polymers but the concept is interesting. My criticism of Mirkin's work though is that they oversell the library size. They claim libraries in the millions but the actual number of unique compounds is in the hundreds of thousands. Still really impressive, seeing that I work on a 5 digit scale, but not as big of a number as 1 million.

My undergrad has made some really cool progress on the photolithography stuff that he's been working on. We've been struggling with overexposure of the photoresist, but the last few samples have had really good definition, and we're in 100 micron scale at this point. He's only been in the lab for the last few weeks, so I'm really proud of the progress he's made.