Solid State Materials

Faculty: Andrew Gellman -  Myung Jhon - John Kitchin - James Miller - David Sholl -  Paul Sides

Areas: Surface chemistry, tribology, catalysis, diffusion in solids, fuel cells, magnetic recording, molecular simulation.

Related Programs: Data Storage Systems Center

The Solid State Materials group within the Department of Chemical Engineering comprises a wide range of research areas including semiconductor growth, catalytic properties of surfaces, transport in porous solids, molecular simulation, frictional properties of solid-solid interfaces, and microelectromechanical systems. These topics are at the forefront of chemical engineering research. The group expertise includes both advanced experimental methods for materials characterization and synthesis as well as advanced theoretical and computational methods for simulation and understanding of novel solid properties.

The faculty have backgrounds and degrees in chemical engineering, chemistry, physics, and mathematics, bringing an extremely diverse set of disciplines and expertise to the group. Their individual research groups include roughly twenty graduate students and half a dozen postdocs. Two examples below give an idea of the range of research being conducted. 

Magnetic data storage technology is an important focus of three of the four faculty and several students and postdocs. Disk memory is one of the most rapidly advancing technologies in modern times. To illustrate, the density of data stored on hard disk surfaces has increased at a rate of about 50% per year for the past 30 years, is currently increasing at about 100% per year, and rapidly approaching 100 Gbits/in2. Numerous technological and materials problems, such as the effectiveness and stability of lubricant, the dynamics of the flying head, and measurement of nanometric distances, must be solved to maintain this phenomenal growth rate. The faculty of the Solid State Materials group investigate these and other fundamental aspects of the mechano-chemical relationship between the magnetic sensor and the spinning disk of a hard drive. The faculty of the Solid State Materials group thus are a key part of the Data Storage Systems Center, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center devoted to the development of data storage technologies. 

A second focus within the group is the enantiospecific properties of chiral surfaces and chiral materials. Chiral molecules and surfaces exhibit "handedness;" i.e. there are "right hand" and "left hand" versions of the same entity. Often the active form of a molecule is only one of the two possibilities. These issues are of critical importance for the synthesis of enantiomerically pure pharmaceuticals. The market for these types of drugs is of the order of $100 billion per year and has been increasing at 20% per year for the past five or six years. Enantioselective chemical processing is one of the most difficult problems of modern chemical engineering. Several faculty and students of the solid state materials group are focusing their efforts on the design and the understanding of novel approaches to the solution of this problem.

The Solid State Materials Group has had increasing interaction with the DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) which has sites in Pittsburgh and in Morgantown, West Virginia. These collaborations have arisen from the department’s increased emphasis on energy related research issues. NETL has the DOE’s primary mission for fostering research in coal and fossil energy sources and in other energy technologies. Current work in the Solid State Materials group focuses on the development of hydrogen purification technologies and on catalysis for fuel conversion.