My Contributions:
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Conceived the idea
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Prototyped designs (SolidWorks)
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Conducted fluidics analysis (COMSOL)
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Sourced materials
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Built the fluidics pathways, pump system, and motor control
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Wrote the controls code (C++, G-code)
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Designed and built electrical circuits
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Filmed and edited the product video
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Assisted in filing patent
A grand challenge exists for discovering materials optimized for high-performance energy applications, such as highly stable perovskite solar cells, efficient electrolytic batteries, and high-temperature metal alloys for fusion reactors. Materials discovery is a challenge for these applications because trillions of unique compositions may theoretically exist, but only a select few have been historically synthesized and characterized experimentally. For the case of perovskite semiconductors, there are eight common compounds that can be permutated in over 7 trillion combinations to fulfill the compound blueprint of ABX3 at 1% compositional steps. However, only a fraction of this composition space has been explored.
Archerfish is a solution for high-throughput discovery of functional materials that accelerates the rate of discovering new materials by 10,000x compared to conventional methods of materials discovery, such as spin coating. Archerfish is a droplet-generating multi-material printer that we have designed to deposit matrices of unique material compositions onto a substrate. By varying motor speeds, material precursors are mixed such that the composition of every droplet is a unique permutation of the precursors. The design couples fluid transport systems, mechanical controls, and circuit logic to achieve a production rate of one thousand unique composition droplets per minute and is completely customizable to form different size droplets and explore different material types, such as crystalline salts, metal nanoparticles, and biological materials.
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Therefore, through the design, development, and testing of Archerfish, a high-throughput combinatorial materials exploration system, newly optimized materials from perovskites to fusion metal alloys can be discovered at a fraction of the time and cost – ultimately, removing the barriers to optimal materials selection for high-performance integral product architectures.
Motor & composition control
Fluid path design & simulation
