Jan Torgersen is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at NTNU whose research focuses on the interplay between a material’s shape and its function. Torgersen spoke to us about his life and work at NTNU and his vision for a cleaner planet.

Your ELECTRODE project just won an ERC grant of EUR 1.5 million (NOK 16 million). What is the project’s aim?

Responding to a spike in demand for energy with fossil fuels means firing up another power station. But renewable energy generation isn’t this flexible, so we need better ways to store energy to match up supply and demand.

We’re working on fuel cells, electrolysers, and flow batteries that could help solve this problem. In these devices a liquid acting as a fuel needs to be distributed over a catalyst layer to convert its chemical energy to electrical energy for storage, and vice versa.

The grant is about studying how fuel is distributed through the device and what energy is lost on its journey – the so-called mass transport limitation – and extending it. We are proposing that we employ a new technique based on 3D-printing carbon structures. 

What is different about this technique?

We can create ordered structures of amorphous carbon, which hasn’t been possible before on the scales required to fabricate a fuel cell. Until now, we could not find the optimum design for carbon-based fuel cells because it could not be produced.  Now, though, we can design a transport mechanism on the computer and transfer it into a physical prototype.

Your previous work on biological implants seems far removed from energy storage. Is there a common thread?

That came from the high resolution aspect of our 3D printer. It can mimic the extracellular matrix – the scaffold that surrounds cells in our tissues – in many ways. Like an electrochemical device, a tissue engineering scaffold requires optimising the flow of a liquid. In tissues, that’s bodily fluids carrying nutrients. 

Our 3D-printing platform is a toolbox that can span over these length scales. I think we have a range of possibilities that no one else has. 

How did you come up with the idea to apply that toolbox to energy storage?

During my time at the Nanoscale Prototyping Lab at Stanford, the idea of creating carbon structures for electronic devices using this 3D-printing technique floated around for many years.

When I came to NTNU it came up again because Dr Robert Bock from the Department of Energy and Process Engineering was trying to find someone who could produce ordered carbon structures for use in fuel cells, and he found me. 

We came up with this joint project. It was a side project over the years, but now it's really something that we can put our focus on.

Who else are you collaborating with?

Dr Bock and his colleagues Prof Odne Burheim and Prof Bruno Pollet provide the necessary background in thermodynamic modelling and testing of fuel cell concepts. In addition, Prof Filippo Berto is helping me on issues of structural integrity, which is relevant to the extremely brittle carbon we are producing.

I am also relying heavily on the expertise of Per Erik Vullum at the Norwegian Centre for Transmission Electron Microscopy (NORTEM). With the equipment available at NTNU, he is able to create the highest quality TEM images including chemical characterisation that I have ever had access to. Even Stanford, who we are also working with, sends their samples to NTNU now.

What do you most enjoy about your work at NTNU?

Without my group I couldn't do anything. As a professor you're surrounded by young people that are curious and want to do something. They are thinking fast. They're learning fast. It's a thrilling environment.

Our research right now is exciting. You basically turn one knob, and there are five thousand other things to explore. Unfortunately the day is only 24 hours because there's really so many things going on that I would like to investigate further. 

Is there anything else people should know about Trondheim?

It’s so family friendly. The kindergartens are good and just around the corner. Also it's really convenient to get to the university. That means you have more time to work and less stress in traffic. In terms of private life, Trondheim couldn’t be much better. 

What motivates you at the moment?

We are almost at the closing years where we can really make a difference to the climate crisis. We have to transition to clean energy. I've seen this need more clearly with the birth of my daughter. 

Solving this problem comes down to a change in politics, but I think politics will have it much easier when the technological improvements are really attractive.

Take Tesla. They did not create a very efficient car or economical car, they created a nice car that is very fast. People don't want something that is average. I want to create a performance device that is so attractive that people will switch because it's nice, and not because one should switch.

One also has to be pragmatic. When there is a performance and cost benefit, moving to clean energy is easier and more justifiable. I hope our research will have an impact in solving the climate crisis technologically.

Kelly Oakes, February 2021
 

This week's news articles describe the story behind the development of NTNU’s COVID-19 test, the new Norwegian Quantum Computing Centre, and how advances in silicon processing may lead to more environmentally friendly solar cells .

A list of NTNU papers related to nanoscience, nanotechnology and functional materials published in January 2021 may now found on NTNU Nano's page for publications.

Sometimes, when it comes to friction, less is more – at least that’s what several experiments over the last decade seem to have shown in the case of friction caused by layered materials. But it wasn’t until recently that researchers at NTNU figured out what was actually going on.

Friction probably isn’t something you think about on a daily basis, but as anyone who’s ever slipped over on an icy pavement could tell you, it can play a crucial role in many situations. The downside of friction, though, extends far beyond icy pavements: along with wear, it is responsible for approximately 23% of the world’s energy consumption. 

“Friction is a huge technological problem,” says Astrid de Wijn, a professor in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering at NTNU. “In industrialised societies, where we have machines that are moving constantly or very fast, friction is enormously costly.” 

Studying friction is not as simple as classroom physics demonstrations involving a wooden block on a ramp suggest. “What is really happening is that the surfaces are rough and they meet at some points that are typically quite small,” says de Wijn. “When we study friction we are thinking about these contact points and how they behave.” 

In order to really understand what they can see happening at the real world macroscale, researchers need to be able to explain the complex behavior of the materials at the nanoscale. “Many different things are happening at different length and time scales, and it makes friction very interesting,” says de Wijn.

Layered materials  – such as graphene, which is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern – generally have low friction. They are already used in lubricants, but learning more about how they work could enable us to make the world’s machinery run more smoothly and reduce our energy bill on a global scale. 

But in the last decade, researchers studying how friction works in materials like graphene have found that a single layer actually creates more friction than several layers. “People didn't understand that, and for years they were struggling with it,” says de Wijn. “They did simulations and they reproduced this behaviour but couldn't figure out what was really happening.” 

The problem was, while there were plenty of results apparently showing what was causing the material to behave like this in particular situations, the explanations proposed by different researchers seemed to contradict each other, and nothing stood out. “They all had good arguments and evidence that, in their system, it was their suggested mechanism that was doing it, says de Wijn.

In a recent paper published in Nature Communications, de Wijn and PhD student David Andersson solved the problem. It turns out that all of the proposed solutions are, in a way, right. 

One existing model that often proves helpful for understanding friction was first proposed in 1928 and consists of three elements: a support, a spring and a tip. The friction is then the force required to pull the tip across a sheet. While that works well for explaining many situations, it falls apart when layered materials are involved. So de Wijn and Andersson added just one variable to describe what is happening inside the layers of the sheet that the tip is being pulled across. “We didn't specify what that variable meant exactly – if it was a scrunching up of some kind, or some bending or one of the many possible things that people had proposed,” she says. 

That simple tweak turned out to be the key to explaining several previous results, both from real world experiments and computational models. “Suddenly all the pieces fell into place and we understood what was happening,” says de Wijn. “It could be different mechanisms giving rise to the same kind of dynamics.”

Unfortunately, because of travel restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic, de Wijn and Andersson have not been able to present the work at many conferences or discuss it with colleagues as widely as they would otherwise have done – at least not in person. Nevertheless, now this puzzle has finally been solved, it opens up new avenues for investigating how friction works in layered materials, and could pave the way for new technology to reduce it. 

The work is not over yet, though. The next step for de Wijn is to figure out how thermal fluctuations affect the system. “It's not just an academic puzzle for us,” she says. “Solving this means that we are one step closer to making friction lower.”
 

Kelly Oaks, January 2021

The Rector of NTNU has allocated two PhD-positions in each of the following areas:

• biotechnology, 
• nanotechnology, nanoscience and functional materials
• digital technologies (information and communication technology)

The positions will be allocated to highly innovative projects that have clear potential to contribute to NTNU’s ambition of substantially increasing the number of major national and international research grants, in particular ERC and EIC Pathfinder grants. 

Scientific staff at NTNU are invited to submit research proposals by completing an online application form.

Read more about the announcement here (the link is accessible to NTNU staff only).

Application deadline January 18, 2020.

Questions regarding the announcement may be sent to vilija.balionyte-merle@ntnu.no and torbjorn.svendsen@ntnu.no. Due to festive period, please copy your inquiry to both email addresses. 

Our latest feature article is out! Produced in partnership with The Chemical Engineer magazine, the report by NTNU Nano Director, John de Mello, explains how scientific instrumentation is becoming more open, more affordable and easier to make. You can view it *online* or download it as a *PDF*."

October 2020

The European Research Council (ERC) provides start-up support for promising scientific projects. Through this scheme, associate professor Jan Torgersen and his collaborators have received a starting grant of 1,5 million euros for the project ELECTRODE.

The project will run for five years and address problems related to limitations on mass transport in fuel cells, using 3D printers to create porous photopolymer structures that are completely defined by a computer model.

Read more about Jan Torgersen’s research at Gemini.no

Hanna Gautun, September 2020

Living with diabetes often means having to prick your finger to test blood glucose levels several times a day.

That’s why a group of researchers in Trondheim are working on creating an “artificial pancreas” to take over this responsibility. The work is still in its early stages, but the ultimate aim is for the device to automatically measure glucose levels, and administer insulin according to the results, doing away with regular manual testing.

“We would [measure] the glucose levels every few minutes, so almost continuously,” says Karolina Milenko, a research fellow at NTNU's Department of Electronic Systems and a member of the Artificial Pancreas Trondheim research group, who is working on developing a tiny, implantable blood-glucose sensor for the device. “Then we would have an insulin pump that would be connected with the sensor, allowing the pump to administer insulin accordingly.”

Some people with diabetes already have a pump that delivers a background level of insulin automatically, which they can top up manually when they need to. And some already use a device to measure blood glucose that sits just underneath their skin. These devices, which allow for either continuous or on-demand monitoring, measure the amount of glucose in the fluid that surrounds the body’s cells, and still need calibrating with a finger prick test occasionally.

But an artificial pancreas – which won’t resemble a real pancreas in appearance, but will mimic its role – could combine these two functions, measuring glucose levels continuously and releasing insulin as needed. This would help people with diabetes to keep their blood sugar levels stable, something which is important for both short and long-term health.

In a recent paper published in Optics Letters, Milenko and her colleagues detail a sensor that could one day measure blood glucose levels. It uses two optical fibres, each 220 microns in diameter: one to send light through the test liquid to a enhancement layer, which is made of a thin gold film over a layer of nano-spheres, and second fibre to collected the signal. The sensor can identify a signature in the signal which is unique to the molecule it is designed to measure. A method called surface-enhanced Raman scattering amplifies the signal and makes it possible to see even small amounts of the molecule.

So far Milenko and her colleagues have tested the sensor by measuring the concentration of a dye, but the next step is to move on to measuring glucose itself. “Glucose is actually really difficult to measure in the levels that they are in the body, because of its very low concentration,” says Milenko. Despite the challenges, she says preliminary experiments the group have yet to publish suggest that the sensor can in fact pick up glucose.

For the next step in their research, the team are using hollow fibres, created by researchers at the University of Bath, in the sensor. The idea is that, because the hollow fibres have more favourable optical properties they should provide better sensitivity to glucose.

Milenko hopes the eventual artificial pancreas will be able to respond to changes in blood-glucose levels quicker than existing devices that go under the skin, because it will be placed in a part of the abdomen called the peritoneal cavity. “There is some research showing that the glucose levels, if you measure them in the peritoneal cavity, will have a faster response,” she says.

Continuous monitoring would also be an advantage of the device, because the on-demand testing many people use now doesn’t give them the complete picture of their blood sugar levels. “Even if you do it many times per day, you still might miss the times in a day where your glucose is too high or too low, for example, when you are sleeping, or when you're doing some activities, and you're not able to measure that specific moment,” says Milenko.

It will still be a number of years before the team has a fully functioning device – but for many people with diabetes, it will hopefully have been worth the wait.

Kelly Oakes, August 2020

We are pleased to announce that the NTNU Nano “Impact Fund” is being expanded to include funding of up to 100,000 NOK. The fund supports a wide range of activities that are likely to raise the visibility and impact of NTNU’s work in the area of nanoscience, nanotechnology and functional materials.

Applications of 20,000 NOK or less will be handled in the same way as before via a short online form, and will be considered on a competitive basis at the start of every month. We are prepared to consider any reasonable request for funding that is likely to improve the impact of nanoscience at NTNU. However, potential uses of the fund include production costs for cover articles in high-impact journals, photography or graphical artwork for publicity materials, public communication activities, the development of prototypes, and support for networking and workshops. Unfortunately, we are not able to subsidise conference attendance.

Funding requests above 20,000 NOK will be handled by a separate online form, and will be restricted to applications that aim to produce a tangible product, e.g. databases, software code and demonstrator devices. Preference will be given to ‘open’ projects that release software or hardware into the public domain on a royalty-free basis. Decisions will be made within two months of receiving the application.

Financial support from NTNU Nano should be acknowledged in any resulting publications or presentations.

(Hanna Gautun/NTNU Nano, June, 2020)

Materials science is traditionally a hands-on area of research. But Vishwesh Venkatraman, a researcher in the department of chemistry at NTNU, and his colleagues are investigating new materials from behind a computer screen.

Venkatraman got started in this area when he first came to NTNU and was working on a project to design a molecule from scratch. “You assemble the atoms and bonds and in a way that seems logically possible and at the same time synthetically feasible,” he says.

But the next step – figuring out the properties of these molecules – traditionally involves complex quantum mechanical modelling, making it extremely time-consuming. Any given molecule made up of more than 10 to 12 heavy atoms would typically need 10 to 12 hours of computer time to test, says Venkatraman. “This becomes a stumbling block,” he says. “If you have a million structures to assess, you can't actually wait for 12 hours for every computation.”

So he’s turned to data science instead. By creating a computational model using machine learning instead of quantum mechanics to predict a property of interest – whether that’s the refractive index of a polymer or the conductivity of a liquid – Venkatraman and his colleagues can cut the time needed to assess each molecule down from hours to just seconds.

Researchers can use this kind of machine learning in many different applications. In recent work, Venkatraman has investigated how dyes are affected when they’re applied to a layer of metal oxide, as happens in the manufacture of some kinds of solar cells. “When the dye is deposited on the metal oxide, it actually undergoes a change in its absorption spectrum,” he says, either shifting more towards the ultraviolet or infrared ends of the spectrum, known as a blue shift or a red shift respectively. This change affects how well the dye does its job of harvesting solar radiation, so it’s important for researchers to be able to predict what will happen after deposition.

“The challenge here was, can we predict, just from the structure of the dye, whether it’s going to have a blue shift or a red shift?” he says. He trained his model with a database of around two thousand dyes from the literature, and then used it to predict the behaviour of a further 700 experimentally-tested dyes. His machine learning model predicted that a majority would show a blue shift in agreement with experiments.

The model worked at around 80% accuracy, he says. It’s not intended to entirely replace the more laborious traditional methods of theoretically assessing materials. Instead, the idea is that you can use machine learning to narrow down the list of possibilities, and then do a more detailed analysis on the most promising candidates.

He’s also used machine learning to predict the properties of 8 million synthetically-feasible ionic liquids. Ionic liquids can be used in a variety of applications, from fuel cells to pharmaceuticals. But at the moment, finding new ones tends to require trial-and-error in the lab. By screening millions of candidates for several key properties using data-driven models, Venkatraman hopes to be able to give researchers looking for an ionic liquid with a particular melting point or viscosity, say, a head start.

One of the biggest challenges for Venkatraman and others in this emerging specialism is getting enough good data on the materials he wants to investigate. Rather than working from fundamental principles, machine learning models rely on the data they are given to come to their conclusions. “The machine learning is only as good as the data that you provide it,” he says.

But the situation is getting better, and more people are starting to adopt these methods. “There's a lot more information on materials now than even 10 years ago,” he says.

Kelly Oakes, June 2020

The four winners of the 2020 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience were announced yesterday as Harald Rose, Max Haider, Ondrej Krivanek and Knut Urban for "realising sub-Ångstrøm imaging and chemical analysis in transmission electron microscopy (TEM) using aberration correction." In simple terms, their work makes it possible to “see” atoms.

Due to the corona situation, the laureates will receive their medals together with the Kavli laureates in September 2022, before visiting Trondheim to give their prize lectures at NTNU.
 
You can read more about the Kavli Prizes, the laureates and Electron Microscopy here.

The European Conference on Applications of Polar Dielectrics (ECAPD) will be held at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, from June 14^th to 17^th, 2020.
 

We are looking forward to an exciting meeting and a vivid scientific exchange and hope that you will be able to join us in June 2020.

Please forward this information to colleagues and friends, and help us spreading the news through your network to ensure that we will have an enjoyable and fruitful conference. For additional information, please refer to the conference webpage (www.ntnu.edu/ecapd2020/), where you can find further details and the list of confirmed plenary and invited speakers.

Deadline for abstract submission is March 15^th, 2020.

We are looking forward to welcoming you in Trondheim.
 

The ECAPD Organizing Committee

• John De Mello
• Mari-Ann Einarsrud
• Julia Glaum
• Tor Grande
• Dennis Meier
• Sverre Selbach
• Thomas Tybell

ERC Consolidator Grants are designed to support excellent Principal Investigators at the career stage at which they may still be consolidating their own independent research team or programme. The applicant's planned research must have a ground-breaking nature, high ambitions as well as feasibility.

Dean Øyvind Gregersen congratulating Dennis Meier. – Receiving a grant like this is a great achievement. We look forward to see what Dennis and his research group will accomplish and how it will inspire those around them, says the Dean. Photo: Per Henning / NTNU.

The research grant amounts to just over 1,8 million euros over five years, and will be used for a project Dennis Meier calls "Atronics". The name comes from "Creating building blocks for atomic-scale electronics". The money from the EU will make it possible to add five new positions to the ten researchers who are already working with Meier

With the Atronics project, Dennis and his team will imitate the behavior and functionality of ultra-small electronic components. The research will give new knowledge in physics, and could lead to major breakthroughs in electronics. If the team succeeds, it can lead to much faster networks, and computers that barely use electricity.

Read more about Dennis Meier's research at Gemini.no

The work of Dennis and his colleagues is interdisciplinary, and is, among others a collaboration between the Department of Materials Science and Engineering collaborates the Department of Physics and the SFF Center for Quantum Spintronics (QuSpin).

(Pernille Feilberg, December, 2019)

We are pleased to announce the launch of our new “Impact Fund”, which will contribute funds of up to 20,000 NOK for activities to raise the visibility and impact of NTNU’s work in the area of nanoscience, nanotechnology and functional materials.

The scope of the Fund is not restricted, and we are prepared to consider any reasonable request for funding that is likely to improve the impact of nanoscience at NTNU. However, potential uses of the fund include production costs for cover articles in high-impact journals, photography or graphical artwork for publicity materials, public communication activities, the development of prototypes, and support for networking and workshops.

Applications should be made via a short online form and will be considered on a competitive basis at the start of every month. In exceptional circumstances, it is possible to apply for more than 20,000 NOK, but priority will be given to requests below this level. Financial support from NTNU Nano should be acknowledged in any resulting publications or presentations.

(Hanna Gautun/NTNU Nano, December, 2019)

Professor Asle Sudbø at the Department of Physics has been named Fellow of the American Physical Society. Professor Sudbø is honored for his contribution in research that will contribute to the development of future information technology.

The American Physical Society (APS) is one of the world's largest organization of physicists.
The APS Fellowship Program recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to research results in physics research, important applications in physics, management within or work in physics, or special contributions to physics education.

Professor Sudbø was nominated to be an APS Fellow "for pioneering contributions to the theory of vortex matter in highly fluctuating superconductors, super fluids and multi-component condensates".

Information technology of the future

Sudbø's research could have applications in future green information technology. This is one of the overarching research topics in the Center for Outstanding Research Quantum Spintronics (QuSpin), where Sudbø is one of four main researchers.

Sudbø is currently researching, among other things, new types of superconductors, where the connection between the electron's charge and the spin is important. In superconductors there are important conditions called vortexes, which can be viewed as a number of tornadoes (at the quantum level) of exactly the same strength.

The vortex conditions of these new materials can be manipulated by an electric field, and can provide completely new and more useful properties than before. Among other things, they could conceivably be used as qubits: elementary operating parts in quantum computers.

Prestigious award

Each year, less than half a percent of APS members are recognized by their fellow colleagues and nominated for the "Fellow of the American Physical Society".

Being named Fellow of the American Physical Society is a prestigious award, which also illustrates Sudbø's important contributions to research at the QuSpin research center, says Tor Grande, vice-dean of research at the Faculty of Science.

Pernille Feilberg / NTNU, September 2019

The scope of the Fund is broad, and we are prepared to consider any reasonable request for funding that is likely to improve the impact of nanoscience at NTNU. However, potential uses of the fund include production costs for cover articles in high-impact journals, photography or graphical artwork for publicity materials, public communication activities, the development of prototypes, and support for networking and workshops. Please note, due to limited funds, we are unable to provide support to attend external conferences.

Applications to the Standard Fund should be made via this electronic form, and will be considered on a competitive basis at the start of every month. Applications should be submitted by the first Friday of each month to be considered in that month. In exceptional circumstances, it is possible to apply for more than 20,000 NOK, but priority will be given to requests below this level.

Financial support from NTNU Nano should be acknowledged in any resulting publications or presentations.

The Enhanced Fund is restricted to applications that will produce a tangible product, e.g. databases, software or devices. Preference will be given to ‘open’ projects that release software or hardware into the public domain on a royalty-free basis. Applications that fall outside the remit of the Enhanced Fund should be directed to the Standard Impact Fund.

Applications to the Enhanced Fund should be made via this electronic form, and will be considered on a competitive basis within two months of receiving the application. 

Financial support from NTNU Nano should be acknowledged in any resulting publications or presentations.