Understanding these metamaterials is key to “programming” them correctly, maximizing their utility.  “One of the paradigms of this research is that the material is the machine,” Zeb Rocklin, an assistant professor in the School of Physics, explains. “We're creating a material that performs the mechanical tasks that we want it to, and the processes, forces and displacements in the ways we want it to.”

A new $630,000 NSF CAREER grant will help Rocklin continue that research.

The National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award is a five-year grant designed to help promising researchers establish a foundation for a lifetime of leadership in their field. Known as CAREER awards, the grants are NSF’s most prestigious funding for untenured assistant professors.

The award, for “Geometric and topological mechanics of flexible structures,” will help Rocklin continue developing a new, unified theory for mechanical metamaterials — a group of structures that can flex and move, while having traditional solid components that make it easier to model. The theory could then be applied by other scientists and engineers to create responsive objects with smart fabrics that could respond to changes in environment — like novel knee replacements, responsive airplane wings, and better robots.

Materials as machines

“A solid is defined by the fact that it has a shape, and if I try to change the shape it might generate patterns of stress, or if I hit it, you might hear noise, because it's vibrating,” says Rocklin. “While we often think about things in terms of solids, liquids, and gasses, a lot of the things that are very important to us are not what we think of as a conventional solid.”

Flexible solids, like clothing, robots, and even our own bodies permeate our world, and are often some of the most useful materials we encounter. “This creates this huge challenge,” Rocklin says, “because flexible solids can't always be understood using current techniques of physics. We can write down the equations, but the equations are often too hard for anyone to solve.” For example, imagine trying to predict or replicate the infinite ways a piece of paper can crumple. As a result, flexible solids are often expensive and time consuming to model.

That’s where Rocklin’s new theory comes in.

Mechanical metamaterials

By combining well-known solids with flexible properties, Rocklin hopes to create a mathematically simple theory. “There are philosophical differences and limitations here,” he says, “but as a physicist, I’m looking for universal principles that can apply to a variety of things. Our technique is meant to complement the existing simulations, and it's meant to provide us more insight into these systems so that we can understand how to control them better.”

By building a theory around materials made of repeating solids connected by flexible hinges, Rocklin hopes to make a computationally inexpensive technique to predict and control the deformation of flexible structures. One example of this type of structure consists of  solid square pieces connected by their corners in a checkerboard pattern. The pieces pivot against each other at these hinged corners, allowing the structure to easily expand and contract. “These materials find a sweet spot in between simple solids that were well-characterized in the nineteenth century and the flexible objects that are just too complicated for us to fully describe,” Rocklin adds.

While the material can only deform via one method, (by flexing at the hinges) this does not mean that there is only one way the material deforms. Rather, through this one method of deformation, there are an infinite number of modes or computations that the fabric can assume, illustrating Rocklin's key insight – that a single flexible mode inevitably gives rise to a whole host of complex deformations.

“There's very simple universal math to describe how this type of material operates,” Rocklin adds. “And, when people actually make this material, it turns out that it actually looks like this, and it actually deforms in this way.”

Broad applications

As a theoretical physicist, Rocklin is focused on developing a unified theory that can be applied by experts across many fields. For example, collapsable biomedical devices like stents, which should be small when inserted, but need to expand when inside the body. Inspired by the ever-adapting wings of birds, adaptable airplane wings are also an intriguing frontier.

Rather than minute adjustments via circuitry, airplane wings could be built from these flexible solids, which could be designed to automatically adapt when given a signal from the wind. Building an antenna from materials that respond to certain electromagnetic frequencies, to optimize signal reception, is another of many possible applications for the work. 

Falcomm is built on breakthroughs made over six years in the lab of founder and CEO Edgar Garay to revolutionize the power amplifier, a semiconductor found in devices from satellites to IoT to cellphones, that conditions and blasts the 1s and 0s from software through an antenna. Falcomm’s Dual-Drive PA combines ultra-efficient performance with an architecture that lends itself to production at scale. 

“Power amplifiers are the workhorse of the modern electronic era, but improvement to this technology hasn’t kept pace with the rise of the innovation economy,” said Garay, who holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he conducted the research that led to the formation of his startup.

“Falcomm’s ultra-efficient, silicon-proven technology will bring advances in power and efficiency to the semiconductor industry that help communications manufacturers to realize massive efficiency gains, while lowering costs. With urgent challenges in the environment and supply chain, we can’t wait another 90 years for change.”

With simultaneous transmission at each terminal of a transistor, the Dual-Drive PA delivers performance that is 1.8 times more efficient at 2 times higher power, with half of the silicon area requirements of traditional power amplifiers. For manufacturers, these gains will reduce thermal management and energy costs, while easing overall system requirements. 

A patented architectural design allows the product to be manufactured in high volume by semiconductor foundries in the United States. With fabless technology, the company is poised to grow a network of industry partners that catalyzes expansion in the $23 billion power amplifier market.

Born in Venezuela, Garay developed a passion for using science and engineering to solve problems while repairing machinery on a farm in his hometown. While pursuing doctoral studies at Georgia Tech, he recognized the opportunity to bring innovation to the power amplifier, which had not changed in decades despite the rapid advance of technology and its critical role in devices. 

Garay’s research resulted in multiple patents, spurring him to spin out the technology and create Falcomm through assistance from Georgia Tech resources, including VentureLab and CREATE-X. Falcomm is the first company to receive investment from the Georgia Tech Foundation.

“Georgia Tech is proud to support our academic innovators to help them ensure their inventions have real-world impact,” said Raghupathy Sivakumar, Georgia Tech’s vice president of Commercialization and chief commercialization officer. “The Office of Commercialization is rapidly expanding our programs and initiatives to build out the largest and most robust entrepreneurial ecosystem at any public university. I am happy to say that Falcomm is the recipient of the first equity investment out of our new Research Impact Fund targeted specifically at spinouts based on Georgia Tech intellectual property."

The Falcomm team was recently bolstered by the addition of pioneering industry leaders who have demonstrated a track record of innovation in telecommunications, wireless, and semiconductors:

• Thomas Cameron, Ph.D., chief strategy officer, is a 35-year veteran of technology research and development in the wireless industry. During a 12-year stint at Analog Devices, Cameron served as chief technology officer of the Communications Business Unit and was a leading evangelist for the adoption of 5G connectivity. He held leadership and engineering roles in the RF industry at Bell Northern Research, Nortel, Sirenza Microdevices, and WJ Communications. Cameron has seven patents in wireless technology and has authored numerous papers and technical articles.
• Ned Cahoon, director of Foundry and Customer Relationships, brings more than 20 years of RF business development experience across the mobile and wireless infrastructure industries. He helped to stand up IBM’s $1 billion RF business before joining GlobalFoundries in 2016, where he served as a fellow in the office of the chief technology officer. A senior design and go-to-market leader, Cahoon brings experience building networks across foundries, academia, and technology companies.

For Falcomm, the funding follows quickly on the heels of the company’s selection to the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 in 2023. The company is a graduate of the Berkeley SkyDeck Accelerator and the EvoNexus incubator.

Bringing innovation to the tiny power amplifier can have a massive impact on some of the nation’s most pressing challenges. The energy efficiency gains resulting from an increase in power output come at a time of growing urgency around climate change. The ability to manufacture domestically comes at a time when nearshoring is a priority to address cost and supply chain challenges underscored by the global semiconductor shortage and resulting CHIPS Act.

“Edgar and his team are just as inspiring as they are hard-working. They have shown that it’s possible to assemble the talent and operations to innovate on a foundational technology that hasn’t seen meaningful advances in decades anywhere in the country,” said Guy Filippelli, Squadra Ventures’ managing partner. “By boosting efficiency and manufacturing domestically in the critical semiconductor industry, Falcomm’s innovations will bolster American competitiveness.”

The funding will be used to accelerate go-to-market activities with satellite companies and wireless infrastructure manufacturers, advance the company’s patented technology, and expand the team. Falcomm is actively hiring for roles in operations, engineering, and design. View job openings.

Silon US, a Peachtree City manufacturer that designs and produces engineered compounds used to create a wide range of products — from automotive applications to building materials, such as PEX piping and wire and cable, was experiencing problems with their extrusion line during a time of increasing customer demand. Problems with the drive mechanism on that extrusion line, a piece of equipment critical to the company’s ability to produce, threatened to shut them down. With replacement parts several weeks away, was it safe to continue operating? At what throughput rates? How much collateral damage might be incurred if they continued to operate?

That’s when Silon managers turned to GaMEP for help.

After working through ideas with GaMEP’s manufacturing experts, the team installed wireless condition monitoring sensors that provide continuous, real-time insights on their manufacturing assets’ health. With the sensors, Silon was able to find a sweet spot that not only allowed them to continue operating but also kept them from overexerting the equipment, preventing further damage.

The solution to that problem has now become a routine part of Silon’s process, as company technicians continue to use this sensor technology for early detection of any deviations or anomalies in the machinery’s health, allowing the company’s maintenance team to proactively respond by adjusting scheduled maintenance to avoid costly downtime.

GaMEP’s Sean Madhavaraman says, “Silon is more productive than ever and on track for growth. The strong results in this challenge are a great example of the decades-long focus of GaMEP to educate and train managers and employees in best practices, to develop and implement the latest technology, and to work together with businesses to find solutions.”

Daniel Raubenheimer and Matt Gammon, Silon’s general managers, also lauded GaMEP, saying, “GaMEP’s extensive experience within the manufacturing realm has been a great benefit to our company. The wireless condition monitoring sensors allow us to predict future breakdowns and mitigate a potential catastrophe — allowing us to operate in a safe manner, while saving money, time, and effort.”

Their process reduces the heat required to convert printed polymer resin to silica glass from 1,100 degrees Celsius to around 220 degrees C and shortens the curing time from half a day or more to just five hours. They’ve used it to produce all kinds of glass microstructures, including tiny lenses approximately the width of a human hair that could be used for medical imaging inside the body.

Led by George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Professor H. Jerry Qi, the team described their approach Oct. 4 in the journal Science Advances.

“This is one of the exploratory examples showing that it is possible to fabricate ceramics at mild conditions, because silica is a kind of ceramic,” Qi said. “It is a very challenging problem. We have a team that includes people from chemistry and materials science engaged in a data-driven approach to push the boundary and see if we can produce more ceramics with this approach.”

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

The team’s findings, published in the journal Nature Sept. 20, offer the first window into the intricate workings and mechanistic effects of DBS on the brain during treatment for severe depression.

DBS involves implanting thin electrodes in a specific brain area to deliver small electrical pulses, similar to a pacemaker. Although DBS has been approved and used for movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease for many years, it remains experimental for depression.

This study is a crucial step toward using objective data collected directly from the brain via the DBS device to inform clinicians about the patient’s response to treatment. This information can help guide adjustments to DBS therapy, tailoring it to each patient’s unique response and optimizing their treatment outcomes.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

A team at Georgia Tech and Emory University has created a simple-to-use software program to help. It allows any researcher with imaging data to leverage powerful artificial intelligence algorithms and uncover new insights from their experiments — without knowing how to write complex computer code.

Called iCLOTS, the program is open-source and freely available on a dedicated website with extensive documentation and guidance. The team described the software and how it can help deepen understanding of experimental data in the journal Nature Communications.

Read more about how iCLOTS is unlocking the power of AI for biomedical researchers on the College of Engineering website.

Their project, called Curing the Uncurable via RNA-Encoded Immunogene Tuning (CUREIT), aims to use mRNA to essentially turn genes on or off in individual immune cells. The idea is to reverse the suppression or dysregulation of the immune system that is common in chronic diseases like cancer.

“By combining mRNA-encoded antigens with gene modulation technology, we will be able to radically enhance specific immune responses,” said Philip Santangelo, the project’s leader and a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory. “This technology, which operates transiently without modifying DNA, can offer a potential breakthrough in treating cancers, autoimmune disorders and infectious diseases.”

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

That’s true at home and at work. And it’s true for the critical systems the U.S. Department of Defense relies on to protect the nation.

Think about all the highly sophisticated systems that power drones or fighter jets or even secure authentication programs. Many of those systems are custom software developed at great expense. Which means updating them isn’t as easy as downloading the latest software patch and clicking “Install.”

It often requires a time-consuming rewrite or reverse engineering process that costs even more time and money. But not if a team of Georgia Tech engineers and cybersecurity researchers are successful. They’re among the teams working to speed up the process with a $10 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded effort to unpack these legacy systems, incorporate updates, and redeploy them in weeks or months rather than years.

“The U.S. government has this tremendous problem where they put tons of research and development into cutting edge software, and then two years down the line, it needs to be updated or applied to a new platform or it needs patches. We can’t just go back to the drawing board and rewrite all of our software every few years,” said Brendan Saltaformaggio, an associate professor in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

Read about the team's work on the College of Engineering website.

At the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), researchers are working to expand their fundamental understanding of these hybrid electrolytes, the component that transfers charge between electrodes as the batteries power systems such as electric vehicles (EVs) – and are then recharged. Lithium-ion batteries widely used in today’s EVs rely on liquid electrolytes, which are susceptible to thermal runaway and fire if they are damaged.

“We’ve shown that we can fabricate these hybrid, solid-state electrolytes and put them into coin cells to demonstrate high performance and high stability,” said Ilan Stern, a principal research scientist who leads battery research at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), Georgia Tech’s applied research organization. “We’ve laid the foundation to show that we can develop innovations in solid-state batteries based on these ceramic-polymer hybrids. Our next step is to integrate the technology into pouch cells, the type of batteries used in electric vehicles.”

The GTRI researchers are working with colleagues from Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, School of Materials Science and Engineering, and the Strategic Energy Institute on research into an electrolyte known as lithium aluminum germanium phosphate (LAGP). A polymer component known as poly DOL surrounds the LAGP electrolyte, providing internal ionic conductivity that goes well beyond existing ceramic electrolytes – without the disadvantages of flammable liquids. The fabrication team and academic collaboration are led by Jinho Park, a GTRI research scientist. Synthesis of the LAGP ceramic is led by Jason Nadler, a GTRI principal research scientist.

Advantages of Hybrid Ceramic-Polymer Materials

Stern describes traditional ceramic electrolytes as similar to hard candy – think M&Ms – poured into the space between the battery anode and cathode. The hard ceramics provide safety and energy storage advantages, but are limited in how much they contact the electrodes to transfer ionic charges. Adding the polymer dramatically improves the interfacial contact between the electrodes and electrolyte while maintaining most advantages of the ceramics.

“The electrochemical stability, thermal stability and mechanical stability will be the main differences between the liquid electrolytes and these hybrids,” he said. “We’re really taking the best of both worlds. As solid-state batteries enable the use of a Li-metal anode, the ceiling for capacity is significantly higher, so we should ultimately see a dramatic increase in energy density compared to the conventional Li-ion batteries based on the liquid electrolytes.”

The hybrid ceramic-polymer electrolyte looks like a hockey puck, but will be more resistant to damage than a pure ceramic. “It will certainly be much more forgiving than a ceramic,” Stern said. “Even if micro-cracks develop, the polymer will provide the scaffolding to ensure integrity, holding it together structurally.”

Moving Ahead with Solid-State Batteries

Solid-state batteries are not yet in commercial use, but at least one EV manufacturer plans to put them into vehicles within the next few years as battery manufacturers continue to make improvements. But the technology is far less mature than existing liquid-electrolyte systems, inviting innovations such as the hybrid system the Georgia Tech researchers are working on.

The research is being supported, in part, by a $1.1 million, three-year independent research and development commitment from GTRI. “With the unprecedented federal and state investment made in Georgia for electric vehicles, battery manufacturing, and recycling, GTRI continues to build strong collaborations to help identify gaps and new business models – and to forecast the number and types of recycling plants necessary to respond to future market demands,” Stern added.

Based on encouraging results with small, laboratory-scale batteries, the researchers plan to expand their work into batteries that could be fabricated by the hundreds or thousands for further development and testing – and, ultimately, large-scale manufacturing. “As we increase our efficiency with fabrication, manufacturing costs will come down, while supply chain integration and the sustainability goals of reusability and recycling will have a big impact,” Stern said.

Model-Based System Engineering Guides the Future

Beyond demonstrating the potential for this technology, the research team also is modeling the operation of the cells to help guide future technology development and assessing the potential life cycle of the hybrid electrolyte solid-state batteries. Among the future goals are integrating the technology into supply chains that would not rely on materials sourced from conflict areas of the world, and evaluating new electrode materials such as lithium metal and silicon to replace standard graphite.

“The objective of the model-based system engineering (MBSE) task is to model expert knowledge ranging from the fabrication level to the system integration to unveil opportunities for research as well as new business models,” said Paula Gomez, a GTRI senior research engineer, and the modeling team lead.

The research team is developing models in three main areas: (1) fabrication and performance; (2) manufacturing process; and (3) reuse, refurbish, and recycling. Integrating these models involves evaluating battery efficiency and stability, cost of production, and energy consumption, as well as return on investment of recycling materials.

Though the advantages of solid-state electrolytes are very attractive, there are challenges ahead. A hybrid electrolyte system is more complicated to manufacture, and the electrical, mechanical, and chemical interactions between the materials must be thoroughly studied. “The more complexity you have, the more issues you have to understand,” Stern said.

Military and Economic Development Applications

GTRI is known for its support of national security through research sponsored by U.S. Department of Defense agencies. Stern expects the improved solid-state battery technology will ultimately find its way into military gear carried by soldiers and future generations of electrically powered military vehicles.

The work also supports economic development for the state of Georgia, which is rapidly becoming a hub for electric vehicle and battery manufacturing.

“Georgia is becoming the epicenter of the electrification revolution with vehicle makers such as Rivian and Hyundai, battery companies such as SK, FREYER Battery, and recyclers such as Ascend Elements,” Stern said. “Georgia Tech is contributing to the state’s economic development by helping drive that innovation.”

Battery Day Demonstrates Interest

A recent “Battery Day” held March 30 at Georgia Tech highlighted the broad research collaborations already underway. Led by Matthew McDowell, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering, the event attracted more than 230 energy researchers and industry participants.

Beyond those already mentioned, the hybrid battery project includes Michael Shearin, Richard Wise, John Hankinson, Matthew Swarts, Khatereh Hadi, Milad Navaei, and Jack Zentner from GTRI.

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $800 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Fellows represent expertise in a variety of areas of CPSS, which addresses risks where cyber and physical worlds intersect. That includes the Internet of Things, industrial systems, smart grids, medical devices, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and more.

“As devices, systems, and the world continue to become more connected, cyber-related threats that were traditionally limited to the digital domain have made their way to physical systems,” said Raheem Beyah, dean of the College, Southern Company Chair, and a cybersecurity expert. “The College of Engineering has world-renowned cybersecurity and artificial intelligence researchers. This new cohort will continue to expand the College’s breadth of expertise and leadership in CPSS.”

Meet the researchers on the College of Engineering website. 

CREATE-X is a faculty-led, student-focused initiative geared toward instilling entrepreneurial confidence in Georgia Tech students through the creation of startups. Students in the program can take courses and participate in workshops to build business skills, build prototypes, and receive mentorship, funding, and in-kind services to support launching their own startup during the program’s summer incubator, Startup Launch.  

Prior to joining the CREATE-X team, Saxena spent more than 20 years building and guiding multiple startup companies, working as a development engineer and an early-stage venture capitalist, and publishing several research papers on cardiovascular fluid mechanics and mechanical heart valves.  

At Georgia Tech, his alma mater, Saxena studied mechanical engineering. He then earned a European master’s degree from the Von Karman Institute for fluid dynamics and an MBA from Emory University.

Now that he’s the director of CREATE-X, Saxena wants to continue expanding awareness of the programs benefits to as many students as he can.

“My passion for the program has only grown since I joined the team,” Saxena said. “Our students have the skills and creativity to build startups, and I want them to know that CREATE-X will not only help them take their ideas to market, but also instill an entrepreneurial mindset and confidence which will be a lifelong skill for them.”

Since CREATE-X began, more than 5,000 students have been involved, crossing 38 majors.

Saxena said it’s been an honor to be a part of so many students’ entrepreneurial journey. Even after students graduate, Saxena still takes the time to give them advice and connect them to others in the Atlanta business community. That dedication to mentorship has also translated to the students who participate in the program. Founders continually reach out to Saxena to get involved with coaching students and helping the program where they can.

Saxena said he wants to continue building connections across campus and beyond, harnessing the wealth of knowledge, experience, skills and resources of Georgia Tech to help students be successful, regardless of their career pathway after graduation. He also wants to encourage those students that doubt they can create startups to try entrepreneurship as students, when the opportunity cost for them can be significantly lower.

“CREATE-X is rapidly growing, launching more than 350 startups since we began in 2014. Rahul has a proven track record of success at CREATE-X, and I’m confident that his continued leadership will foster even more growth,” Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, vice president of the Office of Commercialization at Georgia Tech. “He has a firm grasp on what students need to gain entrepreneurial confidence and launch successful startups, the dedication to go out on campus and connect with students and other stakeholders, and he has a broad skill set to tackle the challenges of overseeing one of our nation’s largest student entrepreneurship platforms. We couldn’t have picked a better champion for our program.”

A new study from Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering looks closer at using overhead cable line (OCL) technology to power trucks, evaluating if they are wise environmental and economical choices.

For some countries, including the United States as a whole, Sweden and Germany, the team suggests OCL technology is ideal. It’s also beneficial at the state level for New York, Washington, and Georgia. But for other areas, it shouldn’t be implemented until the region’s electric grid is cleaner.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

A tool developed by Georgia Tech researchers can help make the most of those networks, pinpointing the ideal locations for water level sensors to maximize the real-time data available to emergency managers.

In a test case in Chatham County, Georgia, the approach developed by civil engineer Iris Tien reduced 29,000 potential sensor locations to just 381. The idea, then, is that officials can use their local expertise and historical knowledge to pick where to install sensors among those spots.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

The first eight projects in the inaugural cohort, along with the seven projects chosen last year, have been a great success. In this third year, the fellowship is expanding to include an additional seven projects that will further the research collaboration across Georgia Tech’s schools and colleges.

“We really want connectivity to manifest through research collaborations, and it’s advantageous for us to reach into the broad wealth of and depth of talent across the academic schools,” said Mark Whorton, GTRI’s chief technology officer. “From the theoretical research done on campus into the applied research we do at GTRI, we're seeking to take those great capabilities and bring applications into the national security space.”

Across the seven selected fellowship awards for the upcoming academic year, researchers from GTRI labs will co-advise students along with a Georgia Tech faculty member. This year’s projects will lead to innovations in everything from electronic warfare systems, artificial intelligence/machine learning, autonomous systems, and protein sequencing to international policy.

Faculty Research Pairs and Proposals 

What: Reconfigurable Metasurfaces for High-Power Microwave Systems and Emerging EM Spectrum Operation Concepts

Who: Dr. Nima Ghalichechian, Dr. Joshua Kovitz, Walter Disharoon

Unit: School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Advanced Concepts Laboratory (ACL)

Why It Matters: Reconfigurable metasurfaces have the potential to improve high-power microwave (HPM) systems, enabling applications such as adaptive beamforming and beam shaping, frequency tuning, and polarization timing for use in radar, communication systems, directed energy, and other electronic warfare systems. This research proposes to develop reconfigurable metasurfaces using vanadium dioxide (VO2) switch technologies for HPM systems, and demonstrate a reconfigurable reflectarray (RRA) and high-power limiter metasurface.

“Phase-change materials offer a completely new paradigm for the ubiquitous RF switch, a fundamental building block in sensor and electronic warfare systems,” said Kovitz and Ghalichechian. “As a part of this joint effort, we plan to design, fabricate, and test novel reconfigurable and high-power microwave structures based on these phase-change materials.”

What: Interactive Decision-making and Resilient Planning for Long-Horizon Collaborative Manipulation in Complex Military Environments

Who: Dr. Ye Zhao, Dr. Stephen Balakirsky, Maxwell Asselmeier

Unit: School of Mechanical Engineering; Aerospace Transportation & Advanced Systems Laboratory (ATAS)

Why It Matters: Collaborative manipulation, as a class of general-purpose autonomous systems, provides an expansive set of desirable capabilities to perform complex tasks in highly unstructured environments. These autonomous systems could operate in dangerous environments that are inaccessible to first responders, saving labor and reducing the risk to human life. This will open the opportunity of enabling human operators to focus on high-level, critical decisions.

“This fellowship will support human-robot teaming with a robot that has a high level of autonomy along with a sense of touch,” said Balakirsky. “This combination will allow a human operator to provide tasking of dexterous manipulation tasks to the robot without the burden of teleoperation or constant process monitoring. This system has wide-ranging applications from search and rescue to manufacturing.”

What: Trustworthy Edge Systems for Video Analytics: Robustness, Safety, and Resilience

Who: Dr. Ling Liu, Dr. Margaret Loper, Connor Geurin

Unit: School of Computer Science; Information and Communications Laboratory (ICL)

Why It Matters: Video as an edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) service will be a crucial component in many cyber-physical systems and applications. However, most of the video analytics today are typically done in the Cloud, which incurs overwhelming demand for bandwidth. This research is centered on developing trustworthy edge systems for video analytics, including developing the theory, algorithms, and techniques for boosting the robustness of real-time object detection. This will ensure safety and resilience against different types of disruptions and compromises.

“The proliferation of mobile computing and Internet of Things has created a paradigm that pushes computing tasks and services from the network core to the network edge,” said Loper. “Pushing AI to the edge is seen as a promising solution for processing the massive amounts of small data generated by these devices. The findings of this research could fundamentally change how AI-enhanced edge systems will be designed, developed, and deployed, and could lead to a new generation of security and safety-enhanced edge systems.”

What: Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Policy-perspective Explainable and Trusted Artificial Intelligence

Who: Dr. Sehoon Ha, Dr. Robert Wright, Morgan Byrd

Units: School of Interactive Computing; Cybersecurity, Information Protection, and Hardware Evaluation Research Laboratory (CIPHER)

Why It Matters: The emergence of capable artificial intelligence (AI) that can make sequential strategic decisions via deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) has revolutionized various fields, including computer games and robotic control, but they have not yet impacted safety-critical domains such as power grid control, medical treatment, and autonomous driving and far from real-world deployment. This research investigates scalable model-based RL approaches for explainable and trusted AI to develop explainable AI learning frameworks that can be applied to these safety-critical domains.

“AI technologies are becoming more and more capable every day and are on the verge of revolutionizing many fields and industries,” said Wright. “However, AI models are prone to mistakes, and their reasoning can be very opaque, leading to a [reasonable] lack of trust. This effort investigates novel explainable AI approaches for Reinforcement Learning (RL) to improve trust and practicality. Our intent is to develop model-based RL algorithms that can explicitly describe why it is making its decisions, visualize or describe what it expects to happen, and provide counterfactual examples for why it chose not to make decisions.”

What: Two-dimensional Nanopore Sensors for Real-time, Single Molecule Protein Sequencing

Who: Dr. Eric Vogel, Dr. Katherine Young, Noah Baughman

Units: School of Materials Science and Engineering; Cybersecurity, Information Protection, and Hardware Evaluation Research Laboratory (CIPHER)

Why It Matters: There is a significant need to develop rapid protein sequencing technologies that can be used by the warfighter in the field to identify the impact of biological warfare agents or to provide physiological monitoring to enhance soldier performance. A technology to rapidly sequence the primary and secondary structure of proteins at the single-molecule level in real-time does not currently exist. The objective of this work is to develop a rapid protein sequencing prototype technology based on two-dimensional (e.g., graphene, MoS2) nanopore sensors that can be used by the warfighter in the field and enable future research programs which apply this prototype to perform full protein sequencing.

“There is a significant need to develop rapid protein sequencing technologies that can be used to identify the impact of biological warfare agents or to provide physiological monitoring to enhance human performance,” said Vogel and Young. “This fellowship will support the fundamental research necessary to develop nanopore electrochemical sensors based on two-dimensional materials to rapidly sequence the primary and secondary structure of proteins at the single-molecule level in real-time.”

What: Generating Geopolitics: AI, Disinformation, and the Future of National Security

Who: Dr. Jon Lindsay, Mr. Nicholas Nelson, Dennis Murphy

Units: School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, and School of Public Policy; Electronics, Optics, Systems Directorate (EOSD)

Why It Matters: The use of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) in national security has the potential to enhance our ability to protect national interests greatly. However, there are also potential challenges and risks associated with this technology, such as the potential for bias or misuse. This research will engage in a multidisciplinary study that will bridge the gap between disparate research fields and reintroduce relevant security-related concepts from the social sciences. This will result in the generation of scientifically-grounded potential use cases for the technology in the support and protection of national interests.

“As AI/ML capabilities and use cases continue to evolve, it is critical for defense and national security actors to better innovate, scale, deploy, and integrate AI and autonomy-based technologies to form agile, system-wide solutions,” Nelson and Lindsay said.

What: Unmasking the "Status dilemma/competition" of the triad powers (Russia, China, and United States) in offensive-defensive behavior

Who: Dr. Adam Stulberg, Dr. Theresa Kessler, Megan Litz

Units: Sam Nunn School of International Affairs; Advanced Concepts Laboratory (ACL)

Why it matters: Unveiling the misperceptions of offensive and defensive signaling is needed in a time when offensive and defensive capabilities are becoming ever more difficult to decipher as technology is evolving. The goal of this research is to shed light on how misinterpreting states’ status can lead to international conflict and expand the initial scholarship that is starting to gain traction within the political science and security studies communities. Understanding and attempting to codify intention would be of great interest to U.S. strategists and tactical planners and aid in answering vital questions of National Security regarding the status of triad powers. Information of this nature will benefit U.S. leadership, departments, and inter-agencies that navigate relations with Russia and China.

“This fellowship will support the codification of offensive and defensive signals between Russian, Chinese, and American powers using an open-source literature repository,” said Kessler. “This will help unveil misperceptions and decipher intention.”

Writers: Georgia Parmelee, Tess Malone (Georgia Tech Research); Charles Domercant, Anna Akins (GTRI)
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $800 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Tucker’s passion for problem-solving has propelled her back to Tech. In 2024, 12 years after she stepped onto campus as a first-year Yellow Jacket fresh out of high school, Tucker will be returning as a faculty member with a Ph.D.

Tucker says the most important lesson she learned at Georgia Tech is something she hopes to impart to her own students: “Focus on not just solving hard problems but on hard problems that matter. Make a difference in the real world. You should be passionate about what you’re doing, and you should only do something if you feel strongly about it.”

Tucker has always been fascinated by prosthetics and helping people with lower limb mobility. Her research centers around achieving stable and user-preferred locomotion on robotic assistive devices.

“I love the research world and the fact that you are challenged to solve open-ended problems.

I’ve always loved the intersection of human subject testing, but also pursuing solutions that aren’t necessarily clinically viable at the moment,” she said.

During her time as an eager undergraduate at Georgia Tech, Tucker says she met some of “the most amazing peers and mentors I could ever imagine.” She points to their guidance for helping her “get out” in 2017. When Tucker walked across the stage at her Commencement ceremony and shook hands with then-Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson, she had no idea that he would play another role in her trajectory.

“Bud Peterson was basically a celebrity to me. So, you can imagine my surprise when he sat down to listen to my seminar during my faculty interview in 2022! Having him in the audience definitely made me slightly more nervous, but it was also an immense honor and felt like a milestone in my academic journey,” she said.

That journey will come full circle in January 2024 when Tucker returns to her Georgia Tech roots. But first, she’ll graduate in May from Caltech with her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. In June she’s getting married, and then she’ll move across the country — back to Atlanta where it all began. Tucker will be an assistant professor in both the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

“I always had in the back of my head that coming back as faculty someday was always kind of a pipe dream,” Tucker reminisced. In just a matter of months, her dream will be her reality.

With historic investments from major players in the EV space, including Rivian, Kia, and Hyundai, the state of Georgia is uniquely positioned to serve as a leader in this effort. As the state's leading research institute, Georgia Tech is on the cutting edge of the movement. 

The transportation sector is the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the U.S. at nearly 30%, with passenger vehicles accounting for around 80% of the sector's total output1 as of 2019. Electric vehicles are widely regarded as a budding solution to reduce emissions, but even as both demand and production continue to increase, EVs currently account for around 1% of the cars on America's roadways. 

From the supply chain to the infrastructure needed to support alternative-fuel vehicles alongside consumer hesitancy, achieving the goals set by both the public and private sectors — including the Biden Administration's target of EVs making up at least 50% of new car sales by 2030 — will not be easy. Through research and development, policy, and collaboration, Tech experts are working toward finding solutions that will serve as catalysts during this transitionary period for the environment and the way Americans drive.

Check out the full story. 

Now, what started as a citizen science initiative led by George has turned into a $2.6 million National Fish and Wildlife Association effort to restore degraded salt marshes in Charleston, South Carolina. As part of the project, Joel Kostka, professor and associate chair of Research in the School of Biological Sciences, will lead a team of researchers to not only monitor these restoration efforts, but gain insights into why the marshes degraded in the first place — and how to prevent it from happening in the future.

Over the past three years, Kostka, who has a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, has worked with SCDNR and Robinson Design Engineers, a local firm co-led by Tech alum Joshua Robinson (CEE 2005), to develop engineering and design plans for the restoration of the salt marshes.

“That project went really well,” shared Kostka, “and now we have developed engineering and design plans for the actual restoration as we are moving forward with the next phase.”

Work for the current phase of the project is set to begin soon. Over the next four years, community volunteers will work to plant marsh grasses, restore oyster reefs, and excavate the tidal creeks that supply the marsh with sea water. 

“Because if we don't do this work,” George shared, “then basically it means a place that I grew up in and a place that I call home will no longer exist.”

Read more about the collaborative effort and the community that started it all in the College of Sciences newsroom.

FY22 was another year of growth. Our workforce of more than 2,900 produced 15% higher revenue and many impactful deliverables. In FY23, we will focus on developing our portfolio tools and strengthening our partnerships.

Through this report, we invite you to review the many inspiring stories that showcase our organization’s dedication to providing innovative solutions for government and industry. We hope you will join us as we continue taking our capabilities to new heights.

VISIT THE GTRI 2022 ANNUAL REPORT DIGITAL SERIES

DOWNLOAD THE GTRI 2022 ANNUAL REPORT (PDF)

Through the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Supply Chain and Logistics Institute, Georgia Tech has been providing research and training support to personnel at the base, which supports the USMC mission worldwide. Activities under the new contract will be managed through the Albany installation, which has approximately 3,000 civilian staff and slightly more than 400 military personnel, making it one of the largest employers in Southwest Georgia.

The new Information Analysis Center Multiple Award Contract (IAC MAC) was competitively awarded through the Department of Defense Information Analysis Center. In all, the task order contract specifies 22 areas where GTRI, Georgia Tech, and partner organizations can support the USMC, and is the largest contract ever awarded to GTRI from the USMC.

“This award will continue the applied research efforts that support the analysis, assessment, and integration of technologies and methods to enhance the operations of the Marine Corps logistics, storage, and maintenance capabilities, while also providing potential support to the broader Marine Corps and DoD requirements,” said Larry Kimm, manager of GTRI’s Quantico Field Office and project director for the new contract. “This contract builds upon a nearly five-year partnership between Georgia Tech and the U.S. Marine Corps to provide ‘white-hat’ research and analysis support.”

Research projects conducted under earlier contracts have included the development and demonstration of robotic platform prototypes for improved ground vehicle autonomous inventory operations, and the development of a software tool that rapidly collates disparate inventory information to simplify tracking procedures. Additionally, ongoing workflow optimization modeling and simulation, and analytical studies of MARCORLOGCOM parts, repair, paint, and back-shop maintenance operations are supporting enhanced efficiency and mission readiness requirements. 

Georgia Tech’s Supply Chain and Logistics Institute provides research and education in the application of scientific principles to optimize the design and integration of supply chain strategy, infrastructure, processes, and technology. It has taught courses to hundreds of civilian employees and military personnel at Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, providing advanced training and certification in logistics operations and industrial engineering principles. 

“The Supply Chain and Logistics Institute is pleased to continue engaging with GTRI on Marine Corps Logistics Command’s innovation and improvement needs,” said Timothy Brown, managing director of the Institute. “We look to continue delivering professional education programs, applied research by our Industrial and Systems Engineering faculty and graduate students, and operations improvement efforts by our affiliate researchers.”

Graduate and undergraduate programs at Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) have been ranked first in the nation by U.S. News & World Report for more than a quarter century. The school is the largest of its kind in the United States.

In addition to its Georgia Tech collaborators, GTRI has also worked with multiple subcontractors to collaboratively conduct detailed business case analyses and change management support activities to optimize reorganization decisions and processes for MARCORLOGCOM. Georgia Tech has also involved interns from Albany Technical College and Albany State University in serving the organization’s needs.

In addition to supporting MARCORLOGCOM in Albany, the task order contract will allow GTRI and Georgia Tech to serve the broader needs of the USMC in such areas as automation, airborne networks, command-and-control systems, communications, cybersecurity, data exchange standards, electronic combat, human systems integration, manufacturing optimization, modeling and simulation, secure information systems, software assurance, systems engineering, technology insertion, and technology analysis.

GTRI’s connection to Georgia Tech academic colleges and research institutes makes it attractive to organizations interested in promoting innovation and changing organizational approaches. “Agencies gain access to the world-class expertise we have at Georgia Tech, both within GTRI and on the academic side,” Kimm said.

Located on Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, MARCORLOGCOM provides worldwide, integrated logistics, supply chain, and distribution management; depot-level maintenance management; and strategic pre-positioning capability in support of the operating forces and other supported USMC units to maximize their readiness and sustainability and to support enterprise and program-level total life cycle management.

The DoD IAC collects, analyzes, synthesizes, produces, and disseminates scientific and technical information (STI) to DoD and federal government users. IACs support The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (R&E) in carrying out the R&E community's three strategic guiding imperatives: 1) mitigating new and emerging adversary threats that could degrade U.S. (and allied) capabilities; 2) enabling affordable new or extended capabilities in existing military systems; and 3) developing technology surprise through science and engineering applications to military problems. 

GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia USA

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,800 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

“This collaboration between warfighters and innovators is invaluable,” said Andrew Chang, the lead GTRI planner and coordinator for the workshop. “Georgia Tech and 3ID have been building a strong relationship since the signing of the Educational Partnership Agreement in 2021.”

The Prompt and Resources

Decoys could help shape the battlefield by influencing enemy troops’ movements or drawing fire, revealing their positions.

“The goal of this event is to source real-world tactical problems facing our front-line warfighters with 3ID and work on those problems through a collaboration of talent from 3ID, Georgia Tech Army ROTC, the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and GTRI,” said Chang.

From Jan. 5 – 8, cadets and soldiers worked in teams to design and prototype an array of decoys: a visual, a thermal, and an electromagnetic decoy. The decoy also needed to be easily constructed using locally-sourced materials with minimal building experience.  

“(This year’s) problem set let soldiers interact with students and Georgia Tech experts in their prospective field of study,” said Jose Blanco, one of the GTRI special advisors supporting the event. “This gave them access to a whole new base of knowledge that they don’t have on hand out at their units or the field.”

Creating sustainable innovation means applying today’s technology to today’s problems. GTRI wanted to provide the space and tools needed to accelerate the decoy projects so the attendees had access to a wide array of meeting rooms, collaboration spaces, and workspaces. These resources are otherwise unavailable to 3ID.

Additionally, GTRI advisors were placed within each team to offer design thinking guidance and technical input.

Spaces for Collaboration

Before launching into the official prompt for the weekend, the participants got to know one another and saw how their colleagues approached problems through an icebreaker at the Flowers Invention Studio. The cutting-edge, state-of-the-art makerspace on Georgia Tech’s campus boasts almost 7,000 square feet and over 500 unique tools available for various tasks.

Devesh Ranjan, school chair for Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, welcomed all the workshop participants prior to the icebreaker challenge – to build to best catapult out of popsicle sticks, dowels, and rubber bands.

Student leaders and staff, including Jacob Blevins, Robert Caraway, Ashan Deen, Maxwell Gart, Isabelle Gustafson, and Anand Jha, facilitated the Design Thinking exercise and tours of the makerspace. The wide range of spaces and resources offered all weekend were critical so that participants didn’t pigeonhole their solution based on one specific manufacturing process.

Amit Jariwala, Director of Design & Innovation, explained that innovation requires iterations. The Flowers Invention Studio and IDEA lab in the Wepfer Design Commons was the perfect place for the soldiers to practice rapid prototyping and testing,

“It was incredible to both mentor and observe our ROTC students working alongside the 3rd Infantry Division soldiers as they tackled real technology challenges facing the Army,” said Mike Shannon, Georgia Tech Interim Executive Vice President for Administration & Finance and a retired Army officer. “This event truly showcases the best of the partnership Georgia Tech and 3rd Infantry Division have established.”

As the event pivoted to the main objective, participants also leveraged several other spaces across Georgia Tech and GTRI. The welcome and final presentations were held in the Coda Atrium, while the teams used GTRI conference rooms in Coda as collaborative workspaces. The groups also had access to some GTRI lab spaces in the Advanced Concepts Lab at 430N and the GTRI SEEDLab in the Baker Building to do actual prototyping.

The Outcome

“Through one very intense weekend, the workshop was able to get three prototypes produced, introduce the teams to design thinking, and get a lot of very smart and knowledgeable people working on real problems being faced by soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division,” said Chang.

Each team was able to make significant progress in developing a decoy within their assigned domain.

• The visual team created a full-scale Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV) decoy and demonstrated that it can be constructed by a team of untrained soldiers.
• The thermal team developed a conceptual design on how thermal optics can be deceived by materials-layering and conventional heat sources as well as how it can be integrated with the visual decoy to improve the systems’ overall effectiveness.
• The EM team successfully created and validated a remote-controlled, self-contained decoy emitter that can replicate SC/PT communications emissions with commercially available materials valuing under $50.

“There are many experienced soldiers in the division that can provide ground-up innovations in how the division operates,” said Danielle Shutt, a first lieutenant in 3ID who supported the visual and thermal decoy teams at the event. “These soldiers only require the necessary time and resources to actualize these innovations. Soldiers who take ownership of their work often understand the problems and potential solutions associated with their mission and they should be given opportunities like this hackathon and facilities like the Marne Innovation Center to contribute improvements to their division.”  

What’s especially exciting about this event is that the teams’ work will continue to be developed for possible implementation. One of the prototypes will be taken to the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California, to get tested in a simulated combat environment. Additionally, GTRI will continue to work with 3ID and other partners, such as the Georgia Tech campus, Army Research Lab, Rapid Capabilities, and Critical Technologies Program Office, to find potential pathways for some of the other ideas and prototypes that were a result of this weekend’s efforts.

“I think events like this help foster a bridge of trust between Georgia Tech and the Army, said Blanco. “It gives soldiers a resource to use for problem sets they encounter out in the field or garrison.”

GTRI plans to bring back the Marne Innovation Workshop next year and hopes to expand participation to other schools in the area.

Writer: Katrina Heitz
Photographer: Sean McNeil
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $800 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are developing a set of tools and methodologies that could help companies, federal agencies, and other organizations make those decisions by creating a roadmap of the science and technology (S&T) investments needed to realize a particular capability. Known as Science and Technology Research and Investment for Digital Engineering (STRIDE), the technique helps its users consider the costs and benefits across an entire system lifecycle. 

“STRIDE is really a portfolio management tool,” said Clement Smartt, a GTRI principal research scientist who leads the team developing it. “It helps an organization understand what projects in a given research portfolio they should focus on to meet operational needs given limitations of funding, time, and other considerations.”

Though STRIDE was originally developed to support decision making in the hypersonics community, its core methods and tools can be applied to any S&T portfolio targeted at enhancing performance of existing systems – or building entirely new ones. The output of STRIDE includes information on preferred S&T investment options and allows leadership to ask “what if” questions about potential alternatives.

“The goal is to make better decisions by doing trade space studies to get the answers before any metal is bent,” said Brent Peavy, a GTRI principal research engineer who is also part of the research team. “We are developing STRIDE to support the goal of making decisions based on modeling done with real data.”

The system’s output can include a prioritized set of investment opportunities along with data on the cost of each, the projected benefits, the timeline required to mature the program, and the tradeoffs that should be considered. For inputs, the tool leverages digital models, including those done for engineering, cost, sustainment, and operational analysis. It also can leverage test data for model creation or validation, and consider a project’s effects on an organization’s other investment opportunities.

STRIDE also considers issues that aren’t purely technical. For instance, research program managers must often determine what would happen if additional funding were added to a project, or if budgets were reduced. They also must often know the impacts of extending project deadlines – or shortening them to meet urgent goals. STRIDE also can help assess the impact of changing performance goals such as an air vehicle’s range, top speed, or payload.

“It makes recommendations based on multiple criteria, and a number of technical, cost, and schedule requirements,” said Smartt. “Slider bars associated with the relative importance of those parameters can be moved back and forth, and the recommendations will reflect those changes in priority.”

For decisions such as making improvements to established systems or platforms, STRIDE can consider how implementing those enhancements may affect existing capabilities. Examples might include making a lighter-weight part to improve range, or altering a design to reduce manufacturing costs. Any undesirable consequences of the new capability or enhancement would be factored into the recommendations.

“We can provide a more structured way to select S&T projects by considering their impact on systems of interest that will have to be integrated with the new capability, and then the long-term consequences and tradeoffs in terms of issues such as performance and schedule,” Smartt said.

The novel contribution of STRIDE, however, may be as a systems engineering model that holistically integrates data from all other models, he added. The digital engineering model uses advanced multi-attribute design and portfolio selection methodologies to arrive at recommendations for S&T options. 

For hypersonic vehicles, for instance, decisions on how to get the most return on investment could start with decomposing the technology development goals into subsystems and then trying to understand what may be holding back progress on each subsystem. For example, there could be roadblocks affecting such areas as guidance and navigation, propulsion, sensing, thermal protection, or other technologies. STRIDE can help make decisions about where to invest to make the most progress toward overcoming those roadblocks.

Many of the decision-making principles on which STRIDE is based grew from research in the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL) in Georgia Tech’s School of Aerospace Engineering. ASDL is a leader in the area of systems design, architecting, and optimization, and is the largest lab of its kind in the world. Two GTRI researchers who are graduates of ASDL, Senior Research Engineers Annie Jones-Wyatt and William Engler, identified the potential of STRIDE for making technology decisions for advanced DoD systems, such as hypersonics, and have prototyped the methodology to prove its applicability.

Smartt and Peavy believe that investment priorities will increasingly be driven by structured approaches such as STRIDE and the data-driven principles behind them. They caution that the tool is itself a research project under development that will need refinement before it can be provided as a service or software product.

“We are figuring out how to do this as we go,” Peavy said. “We are trying to answer fundamental questions about how to use digital information to help make decisions.”

STRIDE could support digital engineering goals that are becoming increasingly important to organizations that make large investments in new technology, including the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). But one of the challenges of using it can be providing the quantity of data on which the system depends to make its recommendations.

“Right now, STRIDE is ahead of where most organizations are in digital engineering, but we believe this decision analytics approach will ultimately be the way that key program choices are made, including in the DoD space,” Smartt said. “GTRI is the right organization to help mature this methodology and help organizations adopt it to meet their needs for guiding S&T investments.”

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu).

GTRI Communications

Georgia Tech Research Institute

Atlanta, Georgia USA

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,800 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, the state, and industry. For more information, please visit www.gtri.gatech.edu.

According to Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Hermann Fritz, “There have been significant improvements in Florida and Gulf Coast building codes over the past three decades. Hurricane Ian’s impact was mostly storm surge and storm wave-driven, while the amount of wind damage was limited and highlights the success of advancing building codes since Hurricane Andrew.”

Iris Tien, associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, points to hurricanes increasing in frequency and severity and says it’s not enough to build based solely on what’s happened in the past. “We need to transform our thinking from reacting to events to becoming anticipatory and forward-looking. We don’t want to build just to need to rebuild again when the next hurricane occurs. In creating resilient infrastructure, we need to anticipate what future events, loadings, shocks, and stressors our infrastructure is going to need to withstand, and build to those levels.”

Fritz shares other experts’ belief that storms are likely to become more frequent, and potentially larger, with higher wind speeds, storm surge, and other hazards. Even in basins where storms have been rare, such as the Arabian Sea, there has been an increase in the frequency of storms, which may be linked to increasing sea surface temperature.

Each city, state, and region has its own risk exposure, environmental conditions, and population characteristics. It is critical that builders, city planners, and infrastructure operators look to the future to anticipate what conditions are likely to look like and implement solutions that consider the range of possible storm impacts, as well as environment- and population-specific factors to create and tailor solutions for their specific community.

“Locations and types of infrastructure are both important to consider,” Tien said. “We need to invest in infrastructure that is adaptive to varying levels of demands anticipated for these systems. We also need to invest in infrastructure where success is evaluated by community and population impacts. This will ensure infrastructure that is resilient, sustainable, and equitable in serving communities moving into the future.”

At the time, Colón says she had no idea that her discovery would ultimately inspire her to pursue a career in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and to participate in the GEM Fellowship Program at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).

"My introduction to STEM was through that physics book," Colón said. "I started doing experiments in the book and the first experiment that I vividly remember doing was a viscosity experiment, which astounded me. After that, I knew that I wanted to go into science."   

Each year, GTRI hosts fellows who are a part of the National GEM Consortium. GEM is an organization that recruits underrepresented minority students who are looking to pursue master's and doctoral degrees in engineering and science. Fellows have the opportunity to gain practical engineering summer work experience through an employer sponsor while earning a graduate degree at a GEM member university. The GEM Fellowship Program provides fellows with full tuition, fees, and an annual stipend through the sponsoring universities and employers.  

Colón, who is currently earning her Ph.D. in bioengineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), interned during summer 2022 as a GEM fellow in GTRI's Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory (EOSL). Colón holds a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from Florida Institute of Technology. 

During her internship, Colón researched new ways to target bladder cancer, including evaluating a concept called Fullerene-Antibody Conjugate Energetic Nanoparticles (FACE-NP), which would allow surgeons to microscopically target and remove a patient's malignant tumors without affecting neighboring healthy cells or tissue.

Colón said her team at GTRI treated her as a peer rather than an intern, and trusted her to take the lead on several aspects of the project, including performing chemical reaction tests in the lab and developing the project's final product.

"Nobody ever doubted my abilities," Colón said. "I wasn’t just a researcher helping everyone else on the project, but was up there with them as we determined project specifics and figured out which path to take next."

Colón said she is grateful to be a part of GEM, which has allowed her to meet other GEM fellows who share similar backgrounds and experiences. 

To apply for a GEM fellowship, candidates must be underrepresented members of groups in science and engineering as defied by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and must be in eligible career paths in engineering and science disciplines. They must then submit a statement of purpose, recommendations, transcripts, and a resume or curriculum vitae to GEM and also select their top three member universities and employers.  

Candidates who select GTRI as one of their top choices complete interviews with the labs they are interested in working with.   

Many candidates end up receiving multiple offers from different labs, said Mike Ruiz, a GTRI principal research engineer who serves as the associate chief of the Trusted Microelectronics Program Office within GTRI's Cybersecurity, Information Protection, and Hardware Evaluation Research (CIPHER) Laboratory. Ruiz is also CIPHER's student initiatives lead.

Ruiz said GTRI pays a $20,000 fee to GEM for each student that it sponsors and also pays those students an hourly salary during their internship.

"GTRI's involvement with GEM is not an inconsequential commitment, but it's also something that speaks to how much GTRI is willing to put forth to participate in this particular program," Ruiz said.

He added that the program gives fellows the opportunity to gain real-world STEM experience while creating a pipeline of young talent for the organization.  

"The idea is that when fellows graduate, if they've had a solid internship experience with their sponsor organization, the company would not only be interested in continuing to sponsor that student, but would also be interested in bringing on the student full-time," Ruiz said.

GEM fellows are paired with a GTRI employee who serves as their mentor throughout the internship by providing guidance and support.

Mentors select the projects that GEM fellows work on and try to align those projects with the fellow's background and career goals. GTRI funds the projects either internally or by assigning fellows to existing sponsored research.

Yatis Dodia, a GTRI senior research engineer who leads the Quantitative Methods Branch within CIPHER's Assured Software and Information Division, has served as a GEM mentor for the past two years.

During summer 2022 and 2021, Dodia worked with the same GEM fellow, Enrique Najera, who is currently earning his master's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Colorado. The pair worked on a project that involved researching emerging security practices for 5G telecommunications networks.

Dodia guided Najera on the technical aspects of the project and said he was impressed by Najera's knowledge of complex cyber concepts and eagerness to dig into the research.    

"Enrique was incredibly sharp and self-guided," Dodia said. "I would guide him on technical, big-picture things and he would take those things and run with them."

Dodia added that the technical report Najera produced by the end of his fellowship would guide others in exploring critical security concerns and approaches in 5G.

Even though Najera's internship was held virtually both summers, Najera said he gained exposure to valuable skillsets, such as writing code in the popular programming language Python, which has helped him in graduate school. Najera also said his experience at GTRI has given him a clearer view of what career path he would like to pursue after graduate school.    

"I thoroughly enjoyed my time working at GTRI, despite having never set foot in Atlanta," Najera said. "I found the guidance and mentoring I received every day during both summers to be invaluable, as it both helped me understand the work and shape my thoughts on where I might like to take my career."

To learn more about GEM and its participating universities and employers, please visit: About Us - GEM Fellowship. 

Writer: Anna Akins 
Photo Credit: Carolina Colón
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia USA

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,800 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

SCALE officials said this expansion of the nation’s preeminent program will further its goal to develop a next-generation workforce that can return the United States to prominence in global microelectronics manufacturing.

Georgia Tech participates in the partnership, which is led by Purdue University and managed by NSWC Crane. SCALE facilitates the training of highly skilled U.S. microelectronics engineers, hardware designers and manufacturing experts. SCALE brings together a public-private-academic partnership of 17 universities and 34 partners within the defense industry and government. 

“This is an extremely exciting time in the country and at Tech for microchip design and manufacturing,” said Arijit Raychowdhury, the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). “These newly announced funds for the SCALE program will help Georgia Tech recruit a new, diverse group of students ready to work in defense microelectronics. We’re thrilled to be a SCALE partner university and honored to be leading many of the project’s specialty areas.”

SCALE provides unique courses, mentoring, internship matching and targeted research projects for college students interested in five microelectronics specialty areas. Georgia Tech ECE faculty members will be the primary investigators for three of the areas: 

• system on a chip will be led by Raychowdhury;
• radiation-hardening will be led by John Cressler;
• and heterogeneous integration/advanced packaging will be led by Madhavan Swaminathan.

The other two focus areas are embedded system security/trusted AI and supply chain awareness.

Industry and government partners regularly meet and update a list of knowledge, skills, and abilities important for new entrants to the workforce. The SCALE universities then update their curriculum to ensure the students are prepared for upcoming needs in the rapidly advancing microelectronics field.

Peter Bermel, SCALE director and the Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue, said the United States will need 50,000 trained semiconductor engineers to meet overwhelming and rapidly growing demand.

“The United States is committed to expanding and strengthening its semiconductor industry and workforce rapidly over the next five years,” Bermel said. “SCALE takes a holistic approach to the microelectronics workforce gap by comprehensively addressing system challenges for workforce training and recruiting.”

Goals for the next five years include:

• Expanding student participation in SCALE fivefold to more than 1,000.
• Developing learning models for K-12 classrooms.
• Collaborating with community colleges nationwide to develop microelectronics classes.

The demand for microelectronics increased by 26.2% in 2021. But while the United States consumes about half of the chips produced worldwide, the country only manufactures about 12%, highlighting the pressing need for the U.S. to strengthen its domestic semiconductor supply chains and increase industrial capacity.

The funding announcement is the latest highlight in Georgia Tech’s leadership role in bolstering microelectronics and workforce development. Tech’s large engineering and science faculty bring a broad set of research expertise to strengthen the country’s semiconductor capacity. The Institute is uniquely positioned to train the microelectronics workforce, drive future microelectronics advances, and provide fabrication and packaging facilities for industry, academic and government partners to develop and test new solutions.

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The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Now, physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated — numerically and experimentally — that turbulence can be understood and quantified with the help of a relatively small set of special solutions to the governing equations of fluid dynamics that can be precomputed for a particular geometry, once and for all.

“For nearly a century, turbulence has been described statistically as a random process,” said Roman Grigoriev. “Our results provide the first experimental illustration that, on suitably short time scales, the dynamics of turbulence is deterministic — and connects it to the underlying deterministic governing equations.”

The findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on August 19, 2022. The team of researchers was led by Grigoriev and Michael Schatz, professors in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech who have collaborated on various research projects over the past two decades.

Schatz and Grigoriev were joined in the study by School of Physics graduate students Chris Crowley, Joshua Pughe-Sanford, and Wesley Toler, along with Michael Krygier, a postdoctoral scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, who developed the study’s numerical solvers as a graduate student at Georgia Tech.

A New 'Roadmap' for Turbulence Research

Quantitatively predicting the evolution of turbulent flows — and, in fact, almost any of their properties — is rather difficult. “Numerical simulation is the only reliable existing prediction approach,” Grigoriev said. “But it can be awfully expensive. The goal of our research was to make prediction less costly.”

The researchers created a new “roadmap” of turbulence by looking at a weak turbulent flow that was confined between two independently rotating cylinders — giving the team a unique way to compare experimental observations with numerically computed flows, due to the absence of “end effects” that are present in more familiar geometries, such as flow down a pipe.

“Turbulence can be thought of as a car following a sequence of roads,” said Grigoriev. “Perhaps an even better analogy is a train, which not only follows a railway on a prescribed timetable but also has the same shape as the railway it is following.”

The experiment featured transparent walls to allow full visual access, and it used a state-of-the-art flow visualization to allow the researchers to reconstruct the flow by tracking the motion of millions of suspended fluorescent particles. In parallel, advanced numerical methods were used to compute recurrent solutions of the partial differential equation (Navier-Stokes equation), governing fluid flows under conditions exactly matching experiment.

It is well-known that turbulent fluid flows exhibit a repertoire of patterns — referred to as 'coherent structures' in the field — that have a well-defined spatial profile but appear and disappear in an apparently random manner. By analyzing their experimental and numerical data, the researchers discovered that these flow patterns and their evolution resemble those described by the special solutions they computed. These special solutions are both recurrent and unstable, meaning they describe repeating flow patterns over short intervals of time. Turbulence tracks one such solution after another, which explains what patterns can appear, and in what order.

Recurrent Solutions, Two Frequencies

“All the recurrent solutions that we found in this geometry turned out to be quasi-periodic — that is, characterized by two different frequencies,” said Grigoriev. One frequency described the overall rotation of the flow pattern around the axis of symmetry of the flow, while the other described the changes in the shape of the flow pattern in a reference frame co-rotating with the pattern. The corresponding flows repeat periodically in these co-rotating frames.

“We then compared turbulent flows in experiment and direct numerical simulations with these recurrent solutions and found turbulence to closely follow (track) one recurrent solution after another, for as long as turbulent flow persisted,” Grigoriev said. “Such qualitative behaviors were predicted for low-dimensional chaotic systems, such as the famous Lorenz model, derived six decades ago as a greatly simplified model of the atmosphere.”

The work represents the first experimental observation of chaotic motion tracking recurrent solutions actually observed in turbulent flows. “The dynamics of turbulent flows are, of course, far more complicated due to the quasi-periodic nature of recurrent solutions,” Grigoriev added.

“Using this method, we conclusively showed that the organization of turbulence in both space and time is well captured by these structures,” the researchers said. “These results lay the foundation for representing turbulence in terms of coherent structures and leveraging their persistence in time to overcome the devastating effects of chaos on our ability to predict, control, and engineer fluid flows.”

A New Dynamical Foundation for 3D Fluid Flows

These findings most immediately impact the community of physicists, mathematicians, and engineers who are still trying to understand fluid turbulence, which remains “perhaps the greatest unsolved problem in all of science,” Grigoriev said.

“This work builds and expands on previous work on fluid turbulence by the same group, some of which was reported at Georgia Tech in 2017,” he added. “Unlike the work discussed in that publication, which focused on idealized two-dimensional fluid flows, present research addresses the practically important and more complicated three-dimensional flows.”

Ultimately, the team’s study lays a mathematical foundation for fluid turbulence which is dynamical, rather than statistical, in nature — and hence has the capability to make quantitative predictions, which are crucial for a variety of applications.

“It can give us the ability to dramatically improve the accuracy of weather forecasts and, most notably, enable prediction of extreme events such as hurricanes and tornadoes,” said Grigoriev. “Dynamical framework is also essential for our ability to engineer flows with desired properties, for instance, reduced drag around vehicles to improve fuel efficiency, or enhanced mass transport to help remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the emerging direct air capture industry.”

Funding and acknowledgements: The researchers thank Marc Avila for sharing his Taylor–Couette flow code, and gratefully acknowledge financial support by Army Research Office under Grants W911NF-15-1-0471 and W911NF-16-10281 and by NSF under Grant CMMI-1725587.

Citation and Video: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2120665119

About Georgia Tech

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

The research, in collaboration with Zoo Atlanta, finds that an elephant’s skin doesn’t uniformly stretch. The top of the trunk is more flexible than the bottom, and the two sections begin to diverge when an elephant reaches more than 10%. When stretching for food or objects, the dorsal section of the trunk slides further forward.  

The findings could improve robotics, which today are typically built for either great strength or flexibility. Unlike an elephant’s trunk, the machines can’t do both.

Read about the study and see video from the experiments. 

At just a few inches underground, the rhizosphere — the thin strip of earth that includes the soil-root interface — has so far been difficult to visualize on site. If scientists can build instruments that capture in real-time clearer images of the physical associations of microbes attached to roots, along with the oxygen-carbon-nitrogen chemical exchanges they mediate, it could help mitigate the effects of climate change and lead to the development of more sustainable fuels and fertilizers.

“From a microbiological perspective, we have catalogued what microbes are in the root zone and how abundant they are,” said Joel Kostka, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. “But there's been very little work to understand their dynamics under real soil conditions.”

Kostka, who also serves as associate chair for Research in Biological Sciences, joins Marcus Cicerone, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and principal investigator for the new grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research. The research team also includes Francisco Robles, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Lily Cheung, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the College of Engineering.

Together, the researchers plan to produce a new optical instrument that will provide 3D images of dynamic metabolic processes with chemical specificity — meaning it will be able to identify carbon sources (sugars, organic acids) exuded by plant roots and nitrogen-rich compounds provided to the root by nitrogen-fixing (diazotrophic) microbes. The instrument will be built with commercially available components, and with an eye towards simplicity so that it can be easily leveraged by Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Centers and field sites.

A ‘hotspot for microbes’ in 3D

Understanding more about the metabolic processes happening in the rhizosphere will help the DOE develop a wider range of sustainable products like new types of biofertilizers and biofuels. The research will also help create practices for better crop management — and will help researchers use plants and soil as more effective carbon traps that sequester greenhouse gases from the atmosphere into the soil.

“The problem is that we don’t know much about the free-living bacteria in the soil, because we can’t get in there and look,” Cicerone said. “The DOE wanted somebody to build an instrument that would allow them to image or gather information about the metabolic processes, the interaction — the metabolic interactions between the microbes and the plants, in real time.”

Kostka adds that the rhizosphere is “a hotspot for microbes.”

“It’s often where the plant is communicating with the outside world,” he explained. “Our goal is to develop an instrument that they (the DOE) can use to better understand those interactions between plants and microbes and how those can be tweaked, say, to optimize plant production, crop production, biofuels and biomass production. And that's the long-term goal for us.”

How light gets scattered, smothered, and covered in soil

Cicerone says the visibility issue with soil involves how photons — or particles of light — scatter once they hit the soil. He likens it to someone putting a red light up to the back of their thumb.

“You turn your thumb around, your thumb glows red, right? So, the light comes through, but most of it scatters. The unscattered light contains the spatial information, but it is so weak that you can’t detect it by eye, and you lose the spatial information. The same thing happens with the soils. You get a lot of light scattering, and you lose spatial information,” Cicerone said.

Cicerone and Robles will build instrumentation that will focus light into the soil and that is “exquisitely sensitive to the minuscule amount of light that only scatters when it reaches its target.” Evaluating that light will help scientists learn even more about the chemical processes in the rhizosphere.

The visibility enhancements will be implemented in optical techniques with names like coherent Raman scattering and optical coherence tomography, which are commonly used for non-invasive imaging of thin biological material, like the retina of the eye — or the tiniest of plant roots.

“We learn two things from the light coming out of the sample. The amount of light coming out tells you about the refractive index of the material, and the light’s frequency change tells you about the chemical composition of the material,” Cicerone explained.

It’s through imaging and then optimizing those microbe-plant interactions that the DOE aims to design more sustainable products and practices, based on the chemistry to be learned from the team’s new optical instruments.

“This is a three-year funded project, and we hope at the end of the three years to have an experimental system, where we can do something that nobody else can do,” Cicerone added. “And that is that we can follow the biochemistry under the soil, in situ, in real time, to clearly see what's going on there and find out what the microbes really are doing in natural conditions. At that point, we can start manipulating the biology, start doing the experiments that the DOE is primarily interested in.”

Award Number: DE-SC0022121
Title: Deep Chemical Imaging of the Rhizosphere
Institution: Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta, GA
Principal Investigator: Cicerone, Marcus

About Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

For the past 80 or so years, aluminum nitride (AlN) has been thought of as nothing but an electrical insulator. Because of its high electrical insulating and thermal conductivity properties, it is used frequently in electronic applications to dissipate heat quickly and maintain efficiency.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, led by professor Alan Doolittle, are discovering that there is a lot more to AlN than meets the eye, and their promising research shows the material has the potential to transform the semiconductor industry. By leveraging the advantages of AlN, ultra-wide bandgap (UWBG) semiconductors can be used at high-power and high-temperature levels never seen before.

“It’s rare to see such encouraging early results,” said Doolittle, the Joseph M. Pettit Professor in the School for Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). “To put things into perspective, AlN has the ability to handle over five times the voltage of other existing wide bandgap semiconductors. It really is the birth of a new semiconductor field.”

For electrical devices, there are two types of semiconducting materials needed: one that carries positive charges (p-type) and one that carries negative charges (n-type). The Doolittle group was able to improve current conduction in p-type AlN by 30,000,000 times and n-type AlN by 6,000 times than prior best results.

The findings, recently published in Advanced Materials and the Journal of Applied Physics, received the Most Valuable Contribution Award at the 2022 Workshop on Compound Semiconductor Materials & Devices, a premier workshop in the U.S. on high performance electronic materials.

Ultra-wide Bandgaps Equal Ultra-wide Applications

Georgia Tech’s AlN-based semiconductor findings represent an emerging new area of interdisciplinary research covering materials, physics, and devices with promising applications for future generations of high-power electronics and optoelectronics, as well as quantum electronics and harsh-environment applications.

Semiconductors can both conduct and insulate electricity, meaning they are necessary for all electronic appliances to operate. Scientists make semiconductor materials by using pure elements (most frequently silicon) and adding intentional impurities to make crystals with the desired electrical, thermal, and optical prosperities.

The bandgap is one of the most important properties of a semiconductor, as it represents the minimum energy required for electrical conduction. It is also the largest factor in determining the voltage at which a device fails (called breakdown), as well as represents the energy/wavelength of light emanating from the semiconductor. UWBG semiconductors can operate at high temperatures, frequencies, and voltages, meaning less semiconductor devices are needed in high voltage circuits which increases performance and efficiency, while reducing costs. Doolittle’s AlN-based semiconductor has the highest bandgap ever demonstrated to have both p and n-type conduction needed for electronics.

“The new AlN-based semiconductor appears to have the ability to withstand voltages at incredibly high levels,” said Doolittle. “Levels that can even withstand some sections of the national utility grid, something no other semiconductor can do.”

With the ability to withstand high voltage and high frequency, AlN-based semiconductors can be utilized in power electronic devices found in automotive, industrial, and consumer applications. The technology could also allow utility grids to more effectively control how much power to transmit and where, a growing demand as old systems integrate with other smart grid innovations and renewable energy sources.

The team used a much lower temperature to grow the AlN crystals than what is normally utilized to create semiconductor materials. The low heat process allows for more precise control of the material’s surface chemistry during creation and is potentially a groundbreaking innovation in its own right.

“That kind of out of the box solution caught a lot of people off guard,” said Doolittle. “It was thought that you couldn’t grow good quality material at this low of temperature, but we’ve shown that it’s possible and has broad applicability.”

AlN’s Impressive Optical Properties

Unlike an incandescent light bulb where a filament is heated to glow and produce light, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) emit light when an electric current flows through a layered semiconductor device. The wide bandgap semiconductor material gallium nitride (GaN) was used to create the first LED blue light in the early 1990s by Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura (for which they won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics). Creating the high energy blue LED challenged scientist for decades, as it was the final piece needed to create white light and full-color LED displays that have now revolutionized lighting technology and is predicted to save nearly 20% in energy consumption in the U.S. when fully deployed.

Like GaN, AlN’s wide bandgap means it has enormous light energy which results in the short light wavelengths needed to produce high energy deep ultra-violet (DUV) light beyond the ability of the eye to see. Because AlN has an even larger bandgap than GaN, it produces a DUV light with a wavelength of only 203 nanometers (compared to GaN’s ~365 nm) – nearly twice the energy as light from GaN.

“We're really excited about the optical properties of this material,” said Doolittle. “Researchers have been attempting to get LEDs under 270 nanometer wavelengths for a while now because it opens up an enormous range of applications.”

One such potential application for AlN-based LEDs is light disinfection, a growing focus in research and industry. Unlike current ultraviolet (UV) lights — a light disinfectant plagued by power/efficiency limitations — DUV LEDs use higher energy electromagnetic radiation that is absorbed in the dead layers of human skin instead of being absorbed in live tissue.

“This light gives us a pathway to make light emitters that can kill viruses and bacteria with significantly less — if any — damage to human skin and eyes.” said Doolittle.

Time to Engineer

With the team’s encouraging early studies showing AlN having the potential to be a revolutionary semiconductor material, they now turn to prototyping and optimization. While the new technology is a leap forward and largely solves the most difficult science problems that have roadblocked using AlN as a semiconductor, engineering challenges remain. 

Since such a wide bandgap semiconductor has never been created, a solution to make good electrical contact to the material (for electrical current to be transported to devices) is essential. All known metals are poorly suited to contact AlN, so metal alloys and exotic contacts will be needed, according to Doolittle.

Early prototypes have shown some resistance to current flow that must be improved if AlN is to reach the efficiencies it potentially can achieve. Likewise, thicker devices will need to be engineered to use in the high voltages needed to impact utility grids.

“We have ideas as to how to push this forward and view most of these issues as engineering challenges requiring only time and resources, not fundamental science limitations,” said Doolittle.

***

Citation I: H. Ahmad, J. Lindemuth, Z. Engel, C. M. Matthews, K. Motoki, W. Alan Doolittle, “Substantial P-type Conductivity of AlN Achieved via Beryllium Doping,” Advanced Materials 33 (42), 2104497, September 2021.

DOI: doi.org/10.1002/adma.202104497

Citation II: H. Ahmad, Z. Engel,  C. M. Matthews, S. Lee, and  W. Alan Doolittle, “Realization of homojunction PN AlN diodes”, J. Appl. Phys. 131, 175701 (2022)

DOI: doi.org/10.1063/5.0086314

Funding: This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) Program entitled, “Leveraging a New Theoretical Paradigm to Enhance Interfacial Thermal Transport In Wide Bandgap Power Electronics” under Award No. N00014-17-S-F006 administered by Dr. Mark Spector and Lynn Petersen. This work was also in part supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Award number FA9550-21-1-0318 administered by Dr. Ali Sayir.

Writer: Dan Watson

Photography: Marion Crowder

Media Contact: Dan Watson | dwatson@ece.gatech.edu

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The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

In newly published research, Pawel Golyski and his Ph.D. advisor Gregory Sawicki, associate professor of mechanical engineering and biological sciences at Georgia Tech, investigate whether mechanical energy can be used as a “common currency” to measure how humans use lower limbs to stabilize during walking. Their research, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, lays the groundwork for using mechanical energetics to understand the roles of joints and muscles during unsteady locomotion. The paper also contributed to Golyski’s selection as this year’s recipient of the American Society of Biomechanics’ (ASB) Pre-Doctoral Achievement Award — a prestigious honor that considers a candidate’s entire portfolio of publications.

Golyski, a graduating member of Sawicki’s Physiology of Wearable Robotics (PoWeR) Lab, previously worked as a research scientist with individuals with lower-limb amputation at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. For his graduate work at Georgia Tech, his aim was to develop an understanding of how devices and the human body work together, specifically at the intersection of three elements: muscle mechanics, wearable exoskeletons, and stability during walking.

Each of the three elements relates to the others. Exoskeletons affect a person’s stability while also affecting how their muscles work, and vice versa. But to examine how muscles both interact with exoskeletons and affect stability makes for an interesting challenge, Golyski says. Because, while one can observe how muscle dynamics change with the use of an exoskeleton, how those changes relate to stability is not understood. To understand how all three pillars work together to help humans compensate during a fall, Golyski and Sawicki needed to come up with a new framework to measure stability.

Energy Accountants

The researchers knew that for a person walking at a steady speed on level ground, the net mechanical energy of the person and each leg over one stride — from the heel strike of one leg to the next heel strike of that same leg — is zero. They also knew that energy needed to be equal to mechanical energy at all levels of description of the leg, specifically the joints and muscles.

"The idea is that if we can relate stability to a demand in energy, then we can become accountants, and track how the energy — our currency — changes at the level of the person, muscle, and exoskeleton," Golyski said. “That provides a really powerful framework to relate all three of those areas.”

Golyski and Sawicki designed an experiment with a person walking on a treadmill. Using a split-belt treadmill, they applied short, quick disturbances, known as perturbations, in the form of increases in belt speed to one leg during walking. The purpose was to inject or extract energy during a stride, so that they could then measure how the person’s leg and joint energies change.

For the experiment they used Georgia Tech’s CAREN (Computer Assisted Rehabilitation Environment) — an integrated system used to study stability during movement. It features cameras mounted above a treadmill to track a person’s movement using motion capture markers attached to the person. Using an algorithm designed by Golyski, Sawicki, PoWeR lab Ph.D. student Jennifer Leestma, and a high school mentee, Esmeralda Vazquez, the CAREN can execute perturbations based on a person’s movements — enabling the researchers to initiate perturbations at specific times in the gait cycle. By combining the force of the treadmill with the positional data collected by the CAREN, Golyski and Sawicki can calculate the changes in energy in a person’s individual joints.

Their new framework could assist in determining which part of a person’s body manages responses to destabilizing energy, pointing to specific muscles or joints to target with rehabilitation therapy. It could also open doors to advanced exoskeletons and prostheses that target specific joints to restore stabilizing responses in individuals with impaired balance.

“The body of research that Pawel completed during his doctoral studies is nothing short of impressive. He broke new ground by developing new experimental techniques and a new hip exoskeleton assistive device, making first-of-a-kind muscle imaging measurements, and ultimately answering the question of how exoskeletons modify joint and muscle dynamics to influence human walking stability,” Sawicki said. “I was thrilled that Pawel’s outstanding contributions as a scientist-engineer were recognized by ASB, and I’m even more thrilled that he will return to Walter Reed — his dream job — to apply his new skillset to help people get from here to there.”

This summer, as part of this recognition, Golyski will deliver a research talk during an awards session at the North American Congress on Biomechanics in Ottawa, Ontario. He will also be graduating from Georgia Tech and resuming his work with veterans and active service members at Walter Reed.

Citation: Golyski, Pawel R. and Gregory S. Sawicki, “Which lower limb joints compensate for destabilizing energy during walking in humans?” Journal of the Royal Society Interface.192022002420220024 01 June 2022

DOI: doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0024

Funding: This research was supported by the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development, and Engineering Center (grant no. W911QY18C0140) to G.S.S. and the National Science Foundation (grant no. DGE-1650044) to P.R.G.

Writer: Catherine Barzler

Photography: Rob Felt

Media Contact: Catherine Barzler | catherine.barzler@gatech.edu

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The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Designed to operate between 18 GHz and 50 GHz, the module could help address threat systems operating at millimeter wave frequencies and provide to military applications many of the advantages that millimeter wave technology is bringing to commercial applications such as 5G wireless, internet-of-things devices, and radar-based vehicle collision avoidance systems.

“The goal is to demonstrate small size, weight, power, and cost in a wideband millimeter wave T/R module,” said Paul Jo, a Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) research engineer who is leading the project. “This would be a major module at the front of the AESA system, right behind the radiator element to process signals.”

Known as Millimeter Wave Active Electronically Scanned Array using Silicon-Germanium Transmit/Receive Modules (MAESTRO), the project represents a collaboration of GTRI and SiGe specialists in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The use of SiGe helps support the high level of integration necessary for the miniaturization required by the module’s high-frequency operation.

“When it comes to millimeter wave frequencies, the AESA element lattice is less than one centimeter in size, and at 50 GHz, it’s three millimeters, which is very challenging to work with,” Jo noted. “That forces an extreme level of integration and miniaturization for this T/R system, which we are addressing through design and fabrication of the small SiGe monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) die.”

The researchers recently completed the fabrication and packaging of a core channel T/R module die, and are designing an evaluation board to demonstrate performance of the module. Also completed is the fabrication of a stand-alone radiator board for wideband and high-frequency applications; that evaluation board also is under test.

Wideband AESAs are an enabling technology for current and future military radar and communications systems by providing rapid beam steering, graceful degradation, electronic production, and low probability of intercept. The atmospheric attenuation of radio-frequency (RF) signals at millimeter wave frequencies is much greater than at microwave frequencies. As a result, high-gain directional apertures such as AESAs are required to propagate energy over tactically relevant distances.

Beyond the high level of integration, the system presents technical challenges related to manufacturing, packaging, and thermal management. For packaging MAESTRO, the research team is evaluating a Flip-Chip Ball Grid Array (FCBGA) solution to reduce the signal path from the die to the printed circuit board.

Earlier in the four-year project, the research team designed and fabricated single-channel and four-channel T/R modules and measured the RF performance of a chip-on-board (CoB)-assembled single-channel T/R module. The measured results confirmed that the designed digital control circuitry works for both Tx and Rx modes – attenuation and true-time delay – and that the time delay was consistent across the target bandwidth.

The MAESTRO program is a collaboration between GTRI and the research team of John Cressler, a Regents Professor at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Cressler’s team specializes in SiGe for heterojunction bipolar devices designed to provide high-frequency performance in mixed-signal circuit and analog circuit ICs.

“Silicon is a standard technology that industry is using to integrate very complicated systems,” Jo noted. “Since we needed to integrate the whole T/R module system into a very small lattice spacing, we decided to use SiGe to integrate all the discrete components.”

During testing of the T/R module, the researchers realized that the receive mode of their system could operate at even lower frequencies – down to 5 GHz – giving it an operating range of 5 GHz to 50 GHz. Efforts are underway to expand the range of the transmit mode to accommodate a similarly wider frequency band.

The MAESTRO project is part of a GTRI initiative to use SiGe semiconductor technology for a variety of RF applications. The SiGe Multifunction IC for Radio Frequency (SMIRF) program is developing a wideband, multichannel, reconfigurable radio frequency transceiver integrated circuit using the SiGe technology. The goal is to enable element-level digital beamforming of an AESA for RF-converged multifunction systems to support concurrent operating modes such as radar, communications, electronic warfare, positioning, and signals intelligence (SIGINT).

MAESTRO has been supported by GTRI’s Independent Research and Development program.

Writer: John Toon (John.Toon@gtri.gatech.edu)

GTRI Communications

Georgia Tech Research Institute

Atlanta, Georgia USA

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,800 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Saeedifard, who has been an ECE faculty member since 2014 and holds a Dean’s Professorship from Tech’s College of Engineering, is being recognized for her research contributions in “highly-efficient, power-dense and fault-tolerant multilevel converter-based medium-voltage drives.” She is one of six award recipients and will be recognized at a commendation ceremony on September 4, 2022, where one recipient will be named the Grand Nagamori Award winner. Each recipient will receive 2 million yen and the Grand Nagamori Award winner will receive a prize of 5 million yen.

Saeedifard is a leading expert on power electronics for energy conversion systems, and was named an IEEE Fellow in January 2022. During her career, she has developed modular and scalable power conversion circuits for medium-and high-voltage applications. 

Some awards and achievements include: 

• Co-Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics since 2021
• U.S. Clean Energy Education and Empowerment (C3E) Technology Research & Innovation Award from the Department of Energy (2021)
• First Place Prize Paper Award from the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics in (2021)
• IEEE Region 3 Outstanding Engineer Award (2019)
• Best Transactions Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics (2018 and 2016)
• IEEE J. David Irwin Early Career Award (2018)
• IEEE Technical Committee Working Group Recognition Award (2015) 
• U.S. National Academy of Engineering, Frontiers in Engineering in Education (2012) 
• U.S. National Academy of Engineering, Frontiers in Engineering (2011) 
• Excellence in Research Award from the Office of Vice President in Research at Purdue University (2012 and 2011)
• IEEE Richard M. Bass Outstanding Young Power Electronic Engineer Award (2010)
• Co-Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Trans. on Power Electronics since 2021

The Nagamori Foundation of Kyoto, Japan, was founded in 2014 by its president, and the founder of Nidec Corporation, Shigenobu Nagamori. In 2021, Jun Ueda, professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, was recognized with a Nagamori Award for his research on cellular actuators. 

Although well-known greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane contribute the most emissions, it is a lesser-known greenhouse gas, sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆), that owns the title as the “most potent.” The man-made gas has a global warming potential 23,900 times than that of CO₂ and an atmospheric lifetime persistence of up to 3,200 years.

Like other greenhouse gases, SF₆, plays a significant, albeit indirect, role in everyday life, as it is a key component in high-voltage circuit breakers and switchgear for electric power systems. For the U.S. to effectively decrease carbon emissions to goals set at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), the country’s electrical power grid will need substantial updating, which includes finding an alternative to SF₆ electrical equipment

“High-voltage alternating current (AC) SF₆-insulated circuit breakers can be found in most electrical substations in the U.S. and around the world. They are vital mechanisms for a reliable and resilient power grid,” said Lukas Graber, associate professor in the Georgia Tech School for Electrical and Computer Engineering. “But any leaks of SF₆ are extremely bad for the environment due to its greenhouse gas effect.”

A team of researchers from Georgia Tech, led by Graber and in collaboration with Mississippi State University, has recently been awarded nearly $4 million from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to develop a three-phase SF₆-free AC high-voltage circuit breaker. Fittingly, the proposed design is called TESLA (Tough and Ecological Supercritical Line Breaker for AC), acknowledging AC electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla. 

The Impact of SF₆

From 2008 to 2018, the annual emissions rate of SF₆ rose from about 7,300 tons to approximately 9,040 tons, an increase of 24%, according to a 2020 study published by the European Geosciences Union. That amount of SF₆ equates to greenhouse gas emissions of approximately 44 million passenger vehicles driven for one year, or 226 billion pounds of coal being burned.

According to ARPA-E, equipment leaks are a major source of SF₆ emissions from the electrical transport and distribution sector. This is particularly true for aging equipment which, due to natural deterioration, is more prone to gas leaks. Ironically, as the U.S. strives to supplant fossil fuel-derived electricity generation with cleaner wind and solar power, the power grid will become increasingly decentralized, which will require more SF₆ gas-insulated equipment.

“The electrical infrastructure in the US is in desperate need of upgrades to accommodate an increasing share of renewable energy, the electrification of the transportation sector, and improved resiliency against cyberattacks,” said Graber. “Existing electrical substations will require new equipment, and as part of these upgrades, a new eco-friendly generation of circuit breakers should be implemented.” 

Looking to Supercritical Fluids 

Replacing SF₆ is no easy task. While SF₆ has exceedingly high global warming potential, the synthetic gas is an excellent electrical insulator — a material in which electric current does not flow freely. The gas is known for its effectiveness, stability, and intrinsic non-toxic, non-corrosive, and non-flammable nature, and while non-SF₆ equipment has long been available for low to medium-voltage applications, there are no alternatives for high-voltage equipment ready for market.

The team’s research has shown that the key to success may be utilizing recent breakthroughs in the dielectric (or electrical insulating) properties of supercritical fluid. A supercritical fluid is a highly compressed fluid that combines the properties of gases and liquids, and is most frequently used for power generation. The team is currently experimenting with supercritical CO₂, which has ecologically friendly attributes that could be utilized in high-voltage equipment.

“Our preliminary results show that the supercritical fluid is a better dielectric than SF₆,” said Zhiyang Jin, research engineer in Graber’s Plasma and Dielectrics Lab at Georgia Tech. “The breakdown voltage of supercritical CO₂ is at least three times that of SF₆, and since CO₂ is everywhere, so a man-made gas will no longer be needed.”

Unlike SF₆ circuit breakers, the design pressure needed for supercritical fluid in TESLA is significant — about ten times higher than SF₆ counterparts. Achieving this design means developing a different circuit breaker chamber to maintain structural integrity during and after the fault current interrupting event. Computational fluid dynamics models have already been developed to study the pressure and temperature changes, and the velocity distribution of supercritical fluids for designs of the chamber, nozzle, and contact system.

In addition to the engineering challenge of connection compatibility with existing high-voltage electrical equipment/infrastructure, and the subsequent workforce training that will entail, market adoption is critical hurdle to clear.

“To replace existing circuit breakers, we cannot just show that TESLA passed all required tests,” said Jonathan Goldman, principal at Georgia Tech’s Venturelab. “Gaining trust from large utility companies is also one of our crucial tasks. We will seek opinions from experts from various backgrounds.”

Goldman and electrical engineering professor Santiago Grijalva will work with several industry partners to guide the design process, explore additional application segments, and advise on the commercialization of TESLA. 

Getting to Work 

The interdisciplinary team will design and build the proposed circuit breaker at a high voltage rating (245 kV, 4 kA) and validate the design and functionality using a synthetic test circuit. The testbed will be modular in design and enable both high-current and high-voltage testing without needing access to a high-power source or generator. According to Graber, the development of such experimental capability is not only important for the TESLA project, but also for the power and energy industry of the U.S.

The three-year ARPA-E-funded project will culminate in the development of a TESLA prototype tested at the Paul B. Jacob High Voltage Laboratory at Mississippi State University — the largest university-operated high voltage facility in North America. The lab is directed by Chanyeop Park, who received his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech. 

The team also includes Juergen Rauleder, assistant professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, and Lauren Garten, assistant professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering.

Raulder will investigate the fluid dynamics inside the circuit breaker and provide guidance for mechanical designs of a high-pressure tank, contact system, and arc quenching mechanism, while Garten will research metal oxide varistor characteristics for direct current circuit breaker applications. Garten’s research would have an impact on another ARPA-E-funded project at Georgia Tech called EDISON led by Graber.

“Edison and Tesla as people never got along with each other, but through advancements in high-voltage circuit breakers, we’re trying to make them good friends,” said Graber. “There is no win or lose for choosing AC or DC nowadays, together they can both make our world a better place to live.”

The technological advancement of optical lenses has long been a significant marker of human scientific achievement. Eyeglasses, telescopes, cameras, and microscopes have all literally and figuratively allowed us to see the world in a new light. Lenses are also a fundamental component of manufacturing nanoelectronics by the semiconductor industry.

One of the most impactful breakthroughs of lens technology in recent history has been the development of photonic metasurfaces — artificially engineered nano-scale materials with remarkable optical properties. Georgia Tech researchers at the forefront of this technology have recently demonstrated the first-ever electrically tunable photonic metasurface platform in a recent study published by Nature Communications.

“Metasurfaces can make the optical systems very thin, and as they become easier to control and tune, you’ll soon find them in cell phone cameras and similar electronic imaging systems,” said Ali Adibi, professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The pronounced tuning measures achieved through the new platform represent a critical advancement towards the development of miniaturized reconfigurable metasurfaces. The results of the study have shown a record eleven-fold change in the reflective properties, a large range of spectral tuning for operation, and much faster tuning speed. 

Heating Up Metasurfaces

Metasurfaces are a class of nanophotonic materials in which a large range of miniaturized elements are engineered to affect the transmission and reflection of light at different frequencies in a controlled way.

"When viewing under very strong microscopes, metasurfaces look like a periodic array of posts,” said Adibi. “The best analogy would be to think of a LEGO pattern formed by connecting many similar LEGO bricks next to each other.”

Since their inception, metasurfaces have been used to demonstrate that very thin optical devices can affect light propagation with metalenses (the formation of thin lenses) being the most developed application.

Despite impressive progress, most demonstrated metasurfaces are passive, meaning their performance cannot be changed (or tuned) after fabrication. The work presented by Adibi and his team, led by Ph.D. candidate Sajjad Abdollahramezani, applies electrical heat to a special class of nanophotonic materials to create a platform that can enable reconfigurable metasurfaces to be easily manufactured with high levels of optical modulation.

PCMs Provide the Answer

A wide range of materials may be used to form metasurfaces including metals, oxides, and semiconductors, but Abdollahramezani and Adibi’s research focuses on phase-change materials (PCMs) because they can form the most effective structures with the smallest feature sizes. PCMs are substances that absorb and release heat during the process of heating and cooling. They are called “phase-change” materials because they go from one crystallization state to another during the thermal cycling process. Water changing from a liquid to a solid or gas is the most common example.

The Georgia Tech team’s experiments are substantially more complicated than heating and freezing water. Knowing that the optical properties of PCMs can be altered by local heating, they have harnessed the full potential of the PCM alloy Ge₂Sb₂Te₅ (GST), which is a compound of germanium, antimony, and tellurium.

By combining the optical design with a miniaturized electrical microheater underneath, the team can change the crystalline phase of the GST to make active tuning of the metasurface device possible. The fabricated metasurfaces were developed at Georgia Tech’s Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN) and tested in characterization labs by illuminating the reconfigurable metasurfaces with laser light at different frequencies and measuring the properties of the reflected light in real time.

What Tunable Metasurfaces Mean for the Future

Driven by device miniaturization and system integration, as well as their ability to selectively reflect different colors of light, metasurfaces are rapidly replacing bulky optical assemblies of the past. Immediate impact on technologies like LiDAR systems for autonomous cars, imaging, spectroscopy, and sensing is expected.

With further development, more aggressive applications like computing, augmented reality, photonic chips for artificial intelligence, and biohazard detection can also be envisioned, according to Abdollahramezani and Adibi.

“As the platform continues to develop, reconfigurable metasurfaces will be found everywhere,” said Adibi. “They will even empower smaller endoscopes to go deep inside the body for better imaging and help medical sensors detect different biomarkers in blood.”

Citation: Abdollahramezani, S., Hemmatyar, O., Taghinejad, M. et al. Electrically driven reprogrammable phase-change metasurface reaching 80% efficiency. Nat Commun13, 1696 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29374-6

What if there was a way for the school supplies and food to be delivered right to your dorm – not by car or foot, but by drone?

One class that is part of the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and Georgia Tech could soon turn that idea into a reality.

The class, called Experimental Flights, is developing a drone delivery network that would allow students on Georgia Tech's campus in Atlanta to place orders for items such as school supplies and food through a mobile app, and have a drone deliver those items to a secure locker station close to their dorm. The app would have a similar look and feel to the app used for popular ridesharing services and students could use it to view wait times for the next available drone, track their package, and receive a unique code to access their purchase.

Michael Mayo, a GTRI senior research engineer who is the lead instructor for the class, said his initial goal is to roll out the drone delivery network to students at Georgia Tech and then to consider other locations later on.

"We’ve been working on this kind of network for a couple of years now and have leveraged knowledge from a lot of different disciplines at Tech – including aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, and computer science," Mayo said. "Success for this project would be for us to develop a fully-functional drone delivery network on Georgia Tech's campus that would serve as a model for future drone delivery networks across the country and world."

VIP is an education program supported by Tech and GTRI that allows undergraduate and graduate students to earn academic credit for working with faculty on projects they don't typically encounter in a classroom setting.

Student teams work closely with faculty advisors and graduate student mentors. Classes are held once a week, though team members usually hold additional meetings outside of class. Prospective students who are interested in joining the program can apply to a team that interests them on Tech's VIP website.

Diversity of Thought

The Experimental Flights class attracts a diverse group of class years and majors.

For the spring 2022 semester, the course included 33 undergraduate students ranging from first years to fourth years with the following majors: aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. Twenty-one of the 33 students took the class in a previous semester.

One of those students is Catherine Heaton, a fourth-year aerospace engineering major who has participated in the Experimental Flights class since the fall 2020 semester. Heaton said working with a diverse group of students has enabled her to apply the concepts she has learned from her major to solve real-world issues, while also gaining experience developing hardware systems that supports emerging technologies.

"I'm on our class' hardware team, so I help assemble all of the parts of the drone and also work a little bit with 3D software modeling," Heaton said. "There's a lot of new technologies coming out – whether it's drones, or other plane-related things – and they all have so much potential."

Another student, Tim Boyer, a third-year electrical engineering major who has also been a member of the class since fall 2020, said he most enjoys VIP's interdisciplinary focus and getting the chance to tinker with drones.

"I really enjoy working with mechanical engineering and computer science majors to make a project come together," Boyer said. "It's also great because I have always been interested in drones, so this class is a great outlet to play around with that kind of hardware."

VIP Programs are now active in over 40 universities, with more than 4,500 students participating per term around the globe. The entire Georgia Tech VIP program currently serves 84 VIP teams involving more than 200 faculty and over 1,500 students. GTRI has 13 VIP teams that involve roughly 40 faculty members.

Preparing for Launch

Mayo's class has assembled a few drone prototypes with the help of drone assembly kits and 3D printing.

The cost to create one drone is under $1,000, and each prototype can currently carry packages that weigh up to 2 pounds, according to Mayo.

"The cost of drones, batteries and other associated components continue to decrease, which makes the economics of this type of delivery system more and more favorable," Mayo said.

Drone delivery offers several benefits to traditional car-based services, including the potential for reduced greenhouse gas emissions as smaller and lighter packages are transported via drones instead of delivery trucks. This alternative delivery method could also reduce roadway congestion and lower the risk of car accidents. Drone delivery could also enable greater route flexibility, resulting in consumers receiving their packages sooner.

Beyond package delivery, drones are useful in disaster relief settings when organizations need to send goods to places with restricted access, and also in military settings to help ground troops collect key intelligence and not risking helicopter crews to deliver supplies.

The Experimental Flights class has successfully completed initial flight testing for their drones in a controlled environment that has been approved by the Georgia Tech Police Department and demonstrated the drones' ability to transport small packages. The class has also constructed a prototype package locker that can securely store multiple packages and that the drone can directly drop packages into.

The class is currently designing the mobile app for end users and a flight control center to manage drone operation. The path the drone takes through campus for each delivery will be automatically generated using an algorithm designed by the class. The algorithm has been designed to optimize the drone's flight path to ensure maximum safety by avoiding flight over people while also reducing delivery times when possible. Drones will fly themselves autonomously to their destination during normal operation.

Mayo noted a fully-operational drone would transmit real-time telemetry and live video streams to the flight control center at all times, and in the event of an emergency, a human operator would assume manual control of the drone. Packages will be secured with both an electromagnet and with the landing gear of the drone itself during transport to reduce the risk of a package becoming dislodged during flight. Rotor cowlings will be added to the drones to minimize the chance of human contact with the rotors – or a fanlike component that drones rely on for propulsion and control – during normal operation and in the event that a drone flies off its approved path.

Before implementing a drone delivery network on campus, the class would need to gain approval from campus administrators and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

"Special preparation will also need to be made to get FAA approval to fly the drones beyond visual line of sight, which is a requirement for most drone operations," Mayo said.

Once the drone delivery system becomes fully operational, the only initial cost to students would be the items that they order, Mayo said. An additional delivery cost, similar to those for food delivery services such as DoorDash and Uber Eats, could be included later on.

Looking ahead, the class aims to perform flight tests where the drone would pick up a sample package and deliver the item to a locker station in one trip.

Beyond the Classroom

Mayo's class is currently seeking corporate collaborations to apply their drone delivery concept to areas such as inventory management and more widespread package delivery. His class is currently collaborating with U.S. furniture company Steelcase to study the use of drones for indoor and outdoor inventory management.

Mayo said he considers a collaboration between students and companies to be a win-win for both groups. Companies are able to build relationships with students who have in-demand skills and who could be hired as entry-level employees. Students, meanwhile, are able to receive feedback from experienced engineers and network with a company that could serve as a potential employment opportunity.

"There are so many advantages to VIP that extend well beyond the classroom," Mayo said.

Writer: Anna Akins
Photos: Christopher Moore
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia USA

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,800 employees supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Over the next two years, the team plans to use several hundred quantum bits (qubits) made of trapped ions to put the unique capabilities of quantum computing systems to work on these challenges. The team, which also includes researchers from Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has already demonstrated key elements of the system using a 10-qubit ion chain.

“The implications of a quantum solution to this optimization challenge could be dramatic,” said Creston Herold, a GTRI senior research scientist who is principal investigator for the program, which is known as Optimization with Trapped Ion Qubits (OPTIQ). “Previously intractable problems could be solvable, and computation time could be reduced from days to hours or minutes. That could allow optimization to be applied to many more tasks, improving operational efficiency, and saving time, money, and energy.”

The research is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of its Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Devices (ONISQ) program. Specifically, the GTRI-led team will use the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) to tackle a difficult optimization challenge known as Max-Cut and related optimization problems.

Optimization Key to Defense and Commercial Applications

Optimization is important to a broad range of defense and commercial challenges, including logistics management, security, reliability, sensing, communications, electronic design and manufacturing, and image segmentation. Package delivery services use optimization algorithms every day to determine the best delivery routes, but some optimization issues are so complex that they cannot be solved using existing approaches. For those, quantum approaches may provide the only solution.

For the quantum component of the project, the research team plans to leverage the massively parallel operations possible with trapped ions, performing many two-qubit gates simultaneously and scaling up to hundreds of qubits. The operations will be performed in two-dimensional ion crystals within Penning traps, devices that contain and control the ions using both a homogeneous axial magnetic field and an inhomogeneous quadrupole electric field.

The project will utilize a unique Penning trap configuration that uses powerful rare-earth permanent magnets instead of bulky, cryo-cooled superconducting magnets. GTRI Senior Research Scientist Brian Sawyer and Research Scientist Brian McMahon developed the trapping system, which was part of McMahon’s Ph.D. thesis at Georgia Tech’s School of Physics.

Hybrid Quantum and Classical Computing Approaches

Because quantum and classical computing rely on dramatically different techniques, they provide different strengths that the project can use in a complementary way, said Swati Gupta, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial and Systems Engineering who studies complex optimization issues.

“The building blocks are quite different for classical computing and quantum computing,” Gupta noted. “That is exciting and challenging to understand as we build a bridge between these two regimes.”

In some cases, only approximate solutions can now be produced by classical computing systems – and even those may require long run times.

“The speed of operations is very relevant these days because we need to make decisions every second and every minute,” Gupta said. “The dream is that by using a combination of classical and quantum machines, we will be able to significantly beat what can be done with just classical devices.”

Second Phase Builds on Initial 10-Qubit Work

During the first 18 months of the project, the researchers demonstrated that they can prepare their optimization machine using an ion chain composed of 10 qubits. In the second phase, they will tackle the challenge of scaling that up to the hundreds of qubits – and perhaps as many as a thousand – that will be necessary to run the optimization algorithm using controls developed with the 10-qubit system.

“One of the goals is to run this optimization algorithm with more qubits than has ever been demonstrated before,” Herold said. “On the way, we are also going to show control in a two-dimensional ion crystal in a Penning trap that has not been demonstrated before. That may lead to applications similar to QAOA, in which we can also add more degrees of freedom to analog simulations of quantum systems with trapped ions.”

In the Penning trap, the ions in the crystal will affect one another, allowing interactions to be created throughout the system.

“In choosing an optimization problem that was most natural for trapped ions, we looked at the fact that a collection of ions in a crystal all ‘feel’ one another,” Herold said. “There is a repulsion between them because they are all positively charged, and that leads to a pairwise interaction between each of the particles that can be created in a global way.”

Addressing the Technical Challenges Ahead

Quantum systems tend to be noisy, which can create a significant error rate. The research team includes scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who are using a supercomputer there to map the best pathway to minimizing noise in the quantum system as it is scaled up.

Among the technical challenges ahead will be maintaining a uniform magnetic field using permanent magnets instead of superconducting magnets, which are normally the size of a residential hot water heater.

“We had the idea to make a small trap to get rid of the superconducting magnet,” said Sawyer. “But you have to play tricks to make sure the field is as uniform as possible because you want every ion spinning at the same rate regardless of where it is in the trap. That is tricky to do with small permanent magnets.”

2D Ion Crystal Formed by Doppler-Laser Cooling

The researchers plan to use Doppler-laser cooling – slowing the motion of the ions – to create a crystalline structure in which the calcium ions are arranged in triangular arrays. Creating that stable structure is crucial to the ability to know the location of each ion so that their states can be individually flipped.

“To run this algorithm, we need to be able to point to one ion and then another ion and know exactly where they are at all times to program the particular graphs we need to solve Max-Cut,” said Herold.

Beyond demonstrating a quantum Max-Cut solver, the research could have implications for other optimization problems that are now considered especially difficult because their solution requires many qubits and a complex circuit.

“These optimization problems can often be translated into others, so if you can solve one of them really well, there’s a class of universal problems that can be addressed,” said Herold. “Solving one particular problem can provide the kernel for an optimizer.”

This research is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under contract No. HR001120C0046. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing official policies, either expressed or implied, of DARPA or the U.S. government.

Writer: John Toon (John.Toon@gtri.gatech.edu)

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,800 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

“There are swimmer micro-robots that move in a fluid with similar size, but these are the smallest ‘walking’ robots that move on a solid surface,” said Azadeh Ansari, the Sutterfield Family Early Career Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

The Georgia Tech study was recently published in the Journal of Micro-Bio Robotics. Currently, most magnetically-actuated micro-bot systems rely on adding multiple electromagnets to enable full control, resulting in higher power consumption and less flexible setups. Being able to demonstrate that a single coil setup is enough for precise bidirectional motion control is a significant hurdle to clear, according to Ansari. With the micro-bots now much easier to operate, the team has been able to demonstrate micromanipulation capabilities.

“With what we’ve shown, we can already think of applying the micro-bots in a lab setting,” said Ansari. “You could have hundreds of robots on the same substrate working akin to ants in a colony.”

In Spring 2019, Ansari’s team showcased larger (two millimeters long) “micro-bristle-bots” that could move by harnessing vibrations. Vibrations are no longer needed to move the micro-bots because of their updated “rocker” design — hence micro-rocker bots. The new design allows the bots to move by performing a stick–slip motion with an out-of-plane magnetic field.

Stick-slip motion basically refers to the two states of the robot; one when the robot is in a pinned/stationary position on the surface and the other when the robot “slips” slightly in one direction and achieves net motion, according to Ph.D. student Tony Wang. When the magnetic field is turned on, the robot will essentially rise and then fall. This motion enables enough kinetic energy to allow the robot to move.

More Than a New Design

Equally as important as the rocker design, the paper demonstrates the novel use of a waveform offset for biasing the direction of the robot's trajectory. The sign of the magnetic field offset (positive or negative), as well as the rocker’s angle with the surface, is what determines the direction the micro-bots will travel. Combined, the rocker design and the magnetic offset make the micro-bots capable of well-controlled, and importantly selectable, movement. The acceleration and deceleration of the micro-rocker bots can further be controlled by changing the frequency of the magnetic field.

The 100-micrometre long micro-bots were 3D printed on to a glass substrate via two-photon lithography and subsequently deposited with a nickel thin film, which acts as a semi-hard magnet in response to external magnetic fields. For many lab applications the robots can be directly printed on the substrate that will go under the microscope, but they can also be printed and transported with a micropipette.

“There are lot of areas the micro-robots can be applied to within the current 2D, under-the-microscope process we’ve established so far,” said Ansari. “But there’s also a future where they can be injected into living organisms to deliver drugs or repair injuries.” 

The team is currently working to equip a micro-bot with a tip that could potentially insert nanoparticles into biological tissue for drug delivery or DNA extraction. Their findings will be presented at the Hilton Head Workshop 2022: A Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems Workshop this June.

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Citation: Tony Wang, DeaGyu Kim, Yifan Shi, and Zhijian Hao, Azadeh Ansari “Bidirectional microscale rocker robots controlled via neutral position offset” (Journal of Micro-Bio Robotics, 2022).  https://doi.org/10.1007/s12213-022-00149-y

Funding: This work is supported by Georgia Tech Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN) and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-1650044. The device fabrication was performed at the Georgia Tech Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology clean room facilities, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant ECCS-1542174). 

Researchers from Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering have developed a novel and flexible solution to address the problem. Their additively manufactured tile-based approach can construct on-demand, massively scalable arrays of 5G+ (5G/Beyond 5G)‐enabled smart skins with the potential to enable intelligence on nearly any surface or object. The study, recently published in Scientific Reports, describes the approach, which is not only much easier to scale and customize than current practices, but features no performance degradation whenever flexed or scaled to a very large number of tiles.

“Typically, there are a lot of smaller wireless network systems working together, but they are not scalable. With the current techniques, you can’t increase, decrease, or direct bandwidth, especially for very large areas,” said Manos Tentzeris, Ken Byers Professor in Flexible Electronics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Being able to utilize and scale this novel tile-based approach makes this possible.”

Tentzeris says his team’s modular application equipped with 5G+ capability has the potential for immediate, large-scale impact as the telecommunications industry continues to rapidly transition to standards for faster, higher capacity, and lower latency communications.

BUILDING THE TILES

In Georgia Tech’s new approach, flexible and additively manufactured tiles are assembled onto a single, flexible underlying layer. This allows tile arrays to be attached to a multitude of surfaces. The architecture also allows for very large 5G+ phased/electronically steerable antenna array networks to be installed on-the-fly. According to Tentzeris, attaching a tile array to an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is even a possibility to surge broadband capacity in low coverage areas.

In the study, the team fabricated a proof-of-concept, flexible 5×5-centimeter tile array and wrapped it around a 3.5-centimeter radius curvature. Each tile includes an antenna subarray and an integrated, beamforming integrated circuit on an underlying tiling layer to create a smart skin that can seamlessly interconnect the tiles into very large antenna arrays and massive multiple-input multiple-outputs (MIMOs) — the practice of housing two or more antennas within a single wireless device. Tile-based array architectures on rigid surfaces with single antenna elements have been researched before, but do not include the modularity, additive manufacturability, or flexible implementation of the Georgia Tech design.

The proposed modular tile approach means tiles of identical sizes can be manufactured in large quantities and are easily replaceable, reducing the cost of customization and repairs. Essentially, this approach combines removable elements, modularity, massive scalability, low cost, and flexibility into one system.

5G+ IS JUST THE BEGINNING

While the tiling architecture has demonstrated the ability to greatly enhance 5G+ technologies, its combination of flexible and conformal capabilities has the potential to be applied in numerous different environments, the Georgia Tech team says.

“The shape and features of each tile scale can be singular and can accommodate different frequency bands and power levels,” said Tentzeris. “One could have communications capabilities, another sensing capabilities, and another could be an energy harvester tile for solar, thermal, or ambient RF energy. The application of the tile framework is not limited to communications.”

Internet of Things, virtual reality, as well as smart manufacturing/Industry 4.0 — a technology-driven approach that utilizes internet-connected “intelligent” machinery to monitor and fully automate the production process — are additional areas of application the team is excited to explore.

“The tile-architecture’s mass scalability makes its applications particularly diverse and virtually ubiquitous. From structures the size of dams and buildings, to machinery or cars, down to individual health-monitoring wearables,” said Tentzeris. “We’re moving in a direction where everything will be covered in some type of a wireless conformal smart skin encompassing electronically steerable antenna arrays of widely diverse sizes that will allow for effective monitoring.”

The team now looks forward to testing the approach outside the lab on large, real-world structures. They are currently working on the fabrication of much larger, fully inkjet-printed tile arrays (256+ elements) that will be presented at the upcoming International Microwave Symposium (IEEE IMS 2022) – the flagship IEEE conference in RF and microwave engineering. The IMS presentation will introduce a new tile-based large-area architecture version that will allow assembly of customizable tile arrays in a rapid and low-cost fashion for numerous conformal platforms and 5G+ enabled applications.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

CITATIONS: He, X., Cui, Y. & Tentzeris, M.M. Tile-based massively scalable MIMO and phased arrays for 5G/B5G-enabled smart skins and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces. Sci Rep 12, 2741 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-06096-9

K.Hu, G.S.V.Angulo, Y.Cui and M.M.Tentzeris, “Flexible and Scalable Additively Manufactured Tile-Based Phased Arrays for Satellite Communications and 5G mmWave Applications,” accepted for presentation at IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS) 2022, Denver, CO, June 2022.

"One of the things I would tell young women is don't just try to fit in – be yourself," said Clark. "Find the things that you're good at, and that you want to do, and go out and do them."

Clark serves as the chief scientist for the Air National Guard Program Office (ANGPO) of the Electronic Systems Lab (ELSYS) at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). In this role, Clark oversees the organization's Independent Research and Development (IRAD) portfolio and develops strategies to promote and enhance the program office's technical capabilities. Much of Clark's work occurs at GTRI's Tucson, Ariz., field office, which provides aircraft engineering and test support for the Air National Guard-Air Force Reserve Command Test Center and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, as well as support for various U.S. Department of Defense computer network defense efforts.

The award is presented annually to a multi-disciplinary research team for “innovative and impactful research that has, or will likely, advance clinical and translational science and positively impact human health,” according to Georgia CTSA, a National Institutes of Health-funded initiative that brings together the University of Georgia, Emory, Georgia Tech and the Morehouse School of Medicine to facilitate clinical and translational research.

“From the start the team has prioritized inclusivity, which is key to maximizing the potential of new technologies to impact society through commercialization or application in patient care settings. We've been very careful to make sure all voices are heard,” said Inan.

The “IV Infiltration Detection Technologies Research Team” is recognized for creating a new biomedical device that monitors for important safety issues that can occur during intravenous (IV) therapy – the process of delivering liquids or medicines through a needle directly into a patient’s veins. The technology has the opportunity to be successfully commercialized for improving patient safety of those receiving IV therapy around the world, especially children

“It’s very exciting that this innovative, high-functioning research team has been honored with the Georgia CTSA Presidents’ Award,” said Julia Kubanek, vice president for Interdisciplinary Research. “Because of this research collaboration between Georgia Tech, Emory, Children's and GCMI, one of the biggest problems affecting patient safety in hospital settings might finally be solved. Georgia Tech is grateful to the Georgia CTSA to be part of this distinction and its help in accelerating the impact of our research in Georgia and beyond.”

Inan, the ECE Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair, is the principal investigator (PI) of the effort and conceived the wearable multi-modal sensing architecture and developed the engineering plans for translating the technology from concept to prototype to preclinical testing and ultimately human subjects testing. Inan incorporated past research on wearable biomedical technology for monitoring things like knee and joint health throughout device development.

The team includes experts in sensing and machine learning for health, pediatric intensive care, vascular access and care, and medical device design and development.

“To address problems this big, you need a big team with more expertise than the narrow technology-focused faculty member and Ph.D. student may have within a given lab,” said Inan.

Members of the award-winning team include:

• Sherry Farrugia, chief executive officer of the GCMI. Farrugia has cultivated the relationship between Georgia Tech and Children's and provided immense support with legal agreements and visibility. She has worked with the team to ensure that regulatory and medical device translation elements are incorporated into the plans.
   
• Mike Fisher, director for product development at GCMI. Fisher worked with Inan and Mabrouk to collaborate on the packaging and cleaning of the wearable prototype in preparation for use in the human subject study at Children's.
   
• Kevin Maher, professor of pediatrics and pediatric cardiologist at Emory School of Medicine. Maher is the Co-PI and serves as the clinical lead for the overall effort.
   
• Samer Mabrouk, research engineer at Georgia Tech ECE. Mabrouk was the lead Ph.D. student on the project from 2017-20 and has been the technical lead on the project as a postdoctoral researcher since 2020.
   
• Amy Parker and Lynn Pogue, registered nurses at Children's. Parker and Pogue were the caregivers that first brought the clinical problem to the attention of the Georgia Tech and Emory team. They have been involved from the start of the project and have provided support, clinical expertise, and user feedback throughout the design process.
   
• Zahidee (Saidie) Rodriguez, pediatric intensivist at Children's. Rodriguez is the key partner for the observational clinical study and facilitated and overseen the data collection and collaborated with the engineering team for data interpretation.
   
• Leanne West, chief engineer for pediatric technologies at Georgia Tech. West contributed intellectually to the project from the start and worked with Farrugia to support the collaborative interactions with the team.

Research by the team began in 2014 when West surveyed doctors and nurses at Children's and learned IV infiltration was cited by many as a major challenge within the field. She reached out to Inan and Maher to form a team to collaborate on the formulation of an innovative, wearable sensing-based medical device for early detection of peripheral IV infiltration and extravasation (PIVIE) events. PIVIE events occur when a fluid leaks outside the vein into the surrounding tissue. Depending on the contents of the IV solution, the effects can range from swelling to blisters, severe tissue injury, or even necrosis.

The team’s innovative multi-modal sensing design has been recently validated in preclinical and observational clinical studies. The team now plans to incorporate a detection alarm with wireless communications in the device to alert caregivers of a PIVIE event, conduct a clinical study to demonstrate safety and effectiveness of the device and algorithm, and submit paperwork for 510(k) clearance from the FDA towards commercialization.

As the winner of the President’s Award of Distinction for Team Science, the team will receive $5,000 towards furthering their work. They were recognized at the 2022 Southeast Regional Clinical and Translational Conference (March 3-4, 2022).

Read more about the team’s research and findings in Innovative IV Sensor Moves Closer to Clinical Trial.

Jarin, who is pursuing her degree in environmental health engineering, earned a $1,000 cash prize for her efforts.

The annual event is sponsored by VentureLab, which helps Georgia Tech researchers explore market opportunities and create startups based on their work. 

In her three-minute pitch, Jarin explained more than 800 million people worldwide lack consistent access to clean drinking water due to the high cost of treatment plants, difficulties in transporting chemicals, and the aftermath of carcinogenic disinfection byproducts.

“With the current trend in water disinfection centered on alternative solutions to standard chemicals like chlorine, we are excited to continue exploring the market opportunities for VoltaPure,” Jarin said. “I am honored and extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to present to a panel of experienced judges — and especially female entrepreneurs — on our current progress with the commercialization efforts for VoltaPure.

VoltaPure’s novel co-axial electrode copper ionization cell enables superior water disinfection, while producing a low-level, safe effluent copper concentration.

“Mo made a compelling case for the commercial potential of her VoltaPure water disinfection technology,” said VentureLab Director Keith McGreggor. “Her idea illustrates why the Innovation Competition is a great opportunity for Georgia Tech student researchers to think about what it might take to start a business based on their work.”

To better understand her technology’s potential, Jarin has already participated in Georgia Tech’s inaugural Female Founders program and audited the CREATE-X Startup Launch program. She was also awarded a $50,000 grant through the National Science Foundation’s Innovation-Corps program to participate in a seven-week bootcamp focused on experiential education to gain insight into her startup’s industry. She is advised by Xing Xie, the Carlton S. Wilder Assistant Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Strong Contenders 

Two other student presenters were selected as runners-up and will each receive $500. Nathan Zavanelli, pursuing a doctoral degree in mechanical engineering/bioengineering, and advised by Woon-Hong Yeo in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, explained the benefits of his “smart patch” for sleep apnea assessments. The disorder affects more than 900 million adults worldwide, but most often goes undiagnosed.

Amirtha Varshini Anbuchezhiyan Sindhanai, a computer science master’s student in Tech’s College of Computing, and advised by James Rehg, described how her technology uses machine learning and machine vision to help job applicants review and enhance their nonverbal communications skills.

LaVonda Brown, a Georgia Tech alumna and founder of startup EyeGage, served as a judge alongside Nammy Vedire, director of platform and operations of Engage, the Georgia Tech-affiliated incubator for enterprise-focused startups.

VentureLab will provide ongoing support, reaching out to all the competitors to offer guidance and help them pursue programs and grants that support the transition from success in the lab to success in the market.

Georgia Tech students, faculty, and staff interested in these opportunities to further the commercialization of their own research may contact VentureLab through its website, venturelab.gatech.edu, or by e-mailing info@venturelab.gatech.edu.

Georgia Tech will provide resources and technical expertise to support the Rotorcraft Vertical Lift Technology Development through task orders in areas such as advanced rotorcraft technologies, testing, flight controls, and health management. Most of the work will be performed on campus, with some taking place at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.

The Rotorcraft Vertical Lift Technology Development (RVLTD) award is an IDIQ (Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity) contract with a total ceiling of $40 million. It allows Georgia Tech to propose, apply, and quickly learn if they’re selected for NASA research projects that could also include developing codes, accessing models for validation, and more.

“Instead of writing a 30-page research proposal and waiting up to year for a decision, this contract vehicle allows us to submit a brief statement of work in response to NASA’s requests for support. We will learn within a few weeks if NASA selects our team for each request,” said Smith, a faculty member in Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering (AE School). “It’s a significant advantage that allows us to collaborate closer with NASA.”

The Georgia Tech group includes GTRI (Georgia Tech Research Institute) and the University of Texas at Arlington. It also includes a number of private companies around the country, with an emphasis on small businesses and organizations led by veterans and women. One of them is Laser Aviation in Duluth, Georgia, which specializes in 3D laser scanning and modeling.

Of the six submissions accepted, Georgia Tech’s proposal was ranked first by the Source Evaluation Board (SEB).

The AE School was one of the nation’s first helicopter rotorcraft research and educational institution. Montgomery Knight became the School’s first director in 1942 and developed one of the first jet-powered rotors for a helicopter. He was among the country’s earliest top researchers of helicopter design.

Through the decades, Georgia Tech has expanded its research to fit the current definition of rotorcraft, which also includes tilt rotors, unmanned air vehicles, and advanced urban air mobility. Georgia Tech has been a Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence (VLRCOE) since 1982, conducting basic research focused on scientific barriers in technologies that support current and future vertical lift capabilities.

The RVLTD award is not restricted to AE researchers. Any Georgia Tech faculty member supporting vertical lift technology can ask to be on the list of faculty who will respond to each NASA request. Those interested should send their contact details and research areas of interest to Smith.

“Georgia Tech faculty and students are contributing to rotorcraft technology research in a variety of ways,” said Smith, who serves as director of the VLRCOE, which receives funding from the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and NASA. “This includes not only vehicle design and analysis in AE, but air traffic control, cyber-physical security, vertiport design, public policy, robotics and sustainability. We have the core faculty and students across the Institute to drive this field. This depth of research, along with our excellent student base, is what makes us more competitive.”

Elastomers, or synthetic rubbers, are widely used in consumer products and advanced technologies such as wearable electronics and soft robotics because of their superior mechanical properties. The researchers found that the material, when formulated into a 3D structure, acted as a superhighway for fast lithium-ion transport with superior mechanical toughness, resulting in longer charging batteries that can go farther.  The research, conducted in collaboration with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

In conventional lithium-ion batteries, ions are moved by a liquid electrolyte. However, the battery is inherently unstable: even the slightest damage can leak into the electrolyte, leading to explosion or fire. The safety issues have forced the industry to look at solid-state batteries, which can be made using inorganic ceramic material or organic polymers.

“Most of the industry is focusing on building inorganic solid-state electrolytes. But they are hard to make, expensive and are not environmentally friendly,” said Seung Woo Lee, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, who is part of a team of researchers who have uncovered a rubber-based organic polymer superior to other materials. Solid polymer electrolytes continue to attract great interest because of their low manufacturing cost, non-toxicity and soft nature.  However, conventional polymer electrolytes do not have sufficient ionic conductivity and mechanical stability for reliable operation of solid-state batteries.

Novel 3D Design Leads to Jump in Energy Density, Performance

Georgia Tech engineers have solved common problems (slow lithium-ion transport and poor mechanical properties) using the rubber electrolytes. The key breakthrough was allowing the material to form a three-dimensional (3D) interconnected plastic crystal phase within the robust rubber matrix. This unique structure has resulted in high ionic conductivity, superior mechanical properties and electrochemical stability.

This rubber electrolyte can be made using a simple polymerization process at low temperature conditions, generating robust and smooth interfaces on the surface of electrodes. These unique characteristics of the rubber electrolytes prevent lithium dendrite growth and allow for faster moving ions, enabling reliable operation of solid-state batteries even at room temperature.

“Rubber has been used everywhere because of its high mechanical properties, and it will allow us to make cheap, more reliable and safer batteries,” said Lee.

“Higher ionic conductivity means you can move more ions at the same time,” said Michael Lee, a mechanical engineering graduate researcher. “By increasing specific energy and energy density of these batteries, you can increase the mileage of the EV.”

The researchers are now looking at ways to improve the battery performance by increasing its cycle time and decreasing the charging time through even better ionic conductivity. So far, their efforts have seen a two-time improvement in the battery's performance / cycle time. 

The work could enhance Georgia’s reputation as a center for EV innovation.  SK Innovation, a global energy and petrochemical company, is funding additional research of the electrolyte material as part of its ongoing collaboration with the Institute to build next-generation solid-state batteries that are safer and more energy dense than conventional LI-ion batteries. SK Innovation recently announced construction of a new EV battery plant in Commerce, Georgia, expected to produce an annual volume of lithium-ion batteries equal to 21.5 Gigawatt-hours by 2023.   

“All-solid-state batteries can dramatically increase the mileage and safety of electric vehicles. Fast-growing battery companies, including SK Innovation, believe that commercializing all-solid-state batteries will become a game changer in the electric vehicle market,” said Kyounghwan Choi, director of SK Innovation’s next-generation battery research center. “Through the ongoing project in collaboration with SK Innovation and Professor Seung Woo Lee of Georgia Tech, there are high expectations for rapid application and commercialization of all-solid-state batteries."

CITATION: M. Lee, et. al, "Elastomeric electrolytes for high-energy solid-state lithium batteries," (Nature, 2022) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04209-4

***

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Now in its 197th year, The Franklin Institute Awards Program pays tribute to its namesake and America’s first citizen scientist, Benjamin Franklin, by honoring 13 individuals for their extraordinary achievements in science, engineering, and business leadership. This awards program is the oldest comprehensive science and technology awards program in the United States and has recognized more than 2,000 of the most pioneering scientists, engineers, inventors, and innovators from across the globe.

Dupuis is being honored for pioneering the technology known as MOCVD (metalorganic chemical vapor deposition). This technology provides the materials quality and ultra-precision required for many device components central to modern life, including LEDS, transistors, lasers, and high-performance solar cells. 

His contributions to the development of MOCVD are among the most significant contributions made in the growth of semiconductor devices in the last 40 years. His work on the understanding and improvement of the MOCVD process was the key development that led to the demonstration of the first MOCVD-grown III-V compound semiconductor heterostructure solar cells, injection lasers, the first CW room-temperature quantum-well lasers grown by any materials technology, and the demonstration of high-reliability MOCVD lasers. These important achievements have had a great impact on the efficient use of energy in the world.

Dupuis has been a faculty member in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech since 2003. He holds the Steve W. Chaddick Endowed Chair in Electro-Optics and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. Dupuis also leads the Center for Compound Semiconductors. Prior to his arrival at Tech, he was a chaired professor at the University of Texas at Austin and worked at Texas Instruments, Rockwell International, and AT&T Bell Laboratories.

Dupuis has received several major honors in the last six years. Earlier this year, he and four of his colleagues were awarded the 2021 Queen Elizabeth Prize in Engineering for the creation and development of LED lighting. In 2019, Dupuis was honored with the Materials Today Innovation Award for his development of the MOCVD technology and seminal contributions to compound semiconductor materials and devices. In 2015, he was one of five pioneers to receive the Draper Prize for Engineering in recognition of the significant benefit to society created by the initial development and commercialization of LED technologies. 

Dupuis has also been recognized with the IEEE Edison Medal and as a Fellow of the IEEE, OSA, the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Infrasound waves can travel long distances – hundreds of miles – and are largely unaffected by obstacles in their way. Generally defined as frequencies below 20 Hertz, infrasound has until now been detected and measured using arrays up to an acre in size that use hollow pipes or elements similar to garden soaker hoses to separate the sounds of interest from noise created by the wind.

GTRI researchers have developed a novel infrasound analysis technique based on wavelet technology, a mathematical approach that represents a signal at different scales, using unique features at each scale. This technique, when applied to infrasound recordings, separates the wind noise from other signals of interest. That allows infrasound sensors to become small enough to be easily portable, permitting new types of measurements – including tracking small and large aircraft and studying effects on humans.

“We have been able to implement wavelet technology to get data more accurate than what has been possible using other methods of removing wind noise,” said Krishan Ahuja, Regents Professor and Researcher and head of GTRI’s Aerospace and Acoustics Technologies Division. “We have come up with a way to completely eliminate the hoses and reduce the size of the windscreen. This can all be done with signal processing.”

Hydrodynamic noise produced by wind has frequencies comparable to those of infrasound, so wind noise must be suppressed to obtain useful measurements. The most common way to achieve this has been to use long pipe arrays or large arrays of soaker hoses to gather the sound. The arrays allow pressure variations to be averaged over the length of the structure, thereby reducing the impact of the turbulent wind field. Other approaches to reduce wind noise use large tents covering the infrasound sensors, which also limits where they can be used.

The technique developed at GTRI uses smaller windscreens – or no windscreens at all – along with a wavelet denoising technique that breaks down the signal mathematically and then partitions out what is wind noise before reconstructing the remaining infrasound for analysis, explained Alessio Medda, a GTRI senior research engineer. The resulting reconstruction produces an infrasound signal in which the noise is greatly reduced.

“One thing I love about Georgia Tech is that you have expertise in every single aspect of electronics,” said Muhannad Bakir, Dan Fielder electrical engineering professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “If I have questions on materials, devices, architectures, circuits, or even software compilers, I don’t have to look far. I turn a corner and there is that expert for you.”

Monolithic to Heterogeneous Electronics Integration

Bakir credited this breadth of knowledge at Georgia Tech with helping the Institute be a leader in shifting from monolithic microelectronics to “heterogeneous” integration. In this type of integration, separately manufactured components become part of a higher-level assembly that, in total, provides enhanced functionality and improved operating characteristics for applications.

“We have to look at a whole host of issues in order to continue to drive cost, performance and energy benefits going forward,” explained Bakir as to the reasons behind this development.

His team is identifying and optimizing the processes and materials of different microelectronic components to get the most out of each one. They then are integrating the different pieces into a single, high-performing system.  Specifically, Bakir is developing new ways to glue or wire these interconnect technologies together in a way that maximizes their performance.

“With most high-power applications, heat is a huge problem. As you build your stack by mounting  multiple chips on top of each other within a single semiconductor package, you really need to think about innovative cooling strategies,” said Bakir. “What you see today is a lot of mixing and matching of different technologies, each optimized for the function they’re performing”

To address this challenge, the Integrated 3D systems (i3DS) Lab, which Bakir directs, is working on novel chip-level microfluidic cooling techniques to enhance heat removal, an area in which Georgia Tech has unique expertise and capabilities. Georgia Tech engineering faculty have won multiple large-scale funded research grants in embedded microfluidic cooling for electronic applications, including 3D chip stacking. The teams demonstrated Georgia Tech's ability to drive advanced cooling technology solutions from fundamental design to manufacturing and integration on leading-edge electronic silicon-testbeds using in-house Georgia Tech facilities.

Bakir’s lab is also working on novel “stitch-chips” that provide a high-speed connection between neighboring chips in a package by avoiding the traditional slow interconnection through a package with high electrical losses.

Bakir considers GTRI “an incredible asset to what we do.” “They have some unique design and fabrication capabilities. Equally important is the fact that GTRI is well known internationally for being able to deliver technologies that are truly differentiated and based on unique designs and processes that we develop inhouse,” Bakir said.

High-Assurance Tools to Assess Chip Vulnerabilities

One of those partners includes Lee Lerner, chief scientist of GTRI’s Cybersecurity, Information Protection and Hardware Evaluation Research (CIPHER) Laboratory.  Lerner’s Lab develops third-party tools to conduct high-assurance microelectronics inspections for global customers like Intel and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on the defense side. His team focuses on high-assurance inspection through testing technologies that provide “assurance of trust,” or peace of mind that these systems perform as expected.

“We can tell you that the tools and devices are actually doing what they're supposed to do and nothing more,” Lerner said.

An additional challenge in this space is that the current chip shortage creates more demand on older chip technologies, which have less security features or more known vulnerabilities than modern devices.

GTRI develops some of the most advanced IP and electronic security protections and features in existence. Because of this work, researchers understand which security features work and which are insufficient given the growing complexity and types of attacks at the hardware level.

According to Lerner, GTRI is making big investments over the next 10 years in building security and trust for microelectronics. In fact, the Institute’s strategic roadmap includes trusted microelectronics as a key pillar.

Increased Cybersecurity Focus 

Georgia Tech is also making big investments, such as establishing the new School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, and hiring expert faculty such as Daniel Genkin, associate professor, who officially reported on Meltdown and Spectre, two of the most widely publicized vulnerabilities in the last decade involving chips in popular devices. In addition to Lerner and Genkin, Alenka Zajić, Ken Byers Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, has pioneered novel inspection techniques of microelectronics.  

“Having a good understanding of the true state of the art of security and trust features, as well as bleeding-edge vulnerabilities, help inform future generations of security protections that need to be incorporated into more devices generally, including approaches to design, so that we don't encounter those types of vulnerabilities,” he said.

Lee says more customers are paying attention to the importance of security flaws in designs and potential vulnerabilities. “They're increasingly investing more, but there still are competing factors of designing for security versus designing for performance,” he added.

He emphasized that microelectronics is fundamentally hardware, which is very expensive to change once it’s fabricated and manufactured. “If big flaws or security exploits are discovered, it's not easy to go back and distribute patches to those systems. Those flaws live on in the microelectronics… sometimes for decades in even critical systems,” Lee noted. That’s where Georgia Tech and GTRI can be a valuable partner, by contributing security and design for trust “very early on in either materials or architectures that improve trust and reliability of devices.”

On the chip innovation side, Georgia Tech faculty are leveraging the institute’s multidisciplinary strengths and semiconductor facilities to solve semiconductor development bottlenecks and improve the performance of chip technologies.

Driving In-Memory Computing

One such innovator is Shimeng Yu, associate professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, whose work on “in-memory compute” could solve the hardware bottleneck in today’s data-intensive applications that increasingly rely on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“Data storage is becoming more important these days. There’s so much data and information from sensors and cameras, we want to do the computation locally using the data within the memory to save on data transfer energy and bandwidth,” Yu explained.

“The memory market today focuses exclusively on data storage, and memory is expensive, accounting for nearly a third of the cost of a chip,” said Yu. His pioneering work merging the compute function with data storage is 10 times more energy-efficient than conventional approaches where data is fetched from a centralized data processor.

To realize this new computing paradigm, Yu and his team are working with the Packaging Research Center (PRC) to package their solution into a prototype and ultimately, a complete system. Their work depends on the ability to innovate at the material/device level and translate those innovations into circuits for prototype demonstrations.

“The capability to facilitate this kind of lab-to-fab tech transfer is critical,” said Yu.

While his team can explore new materials and standalone device structures in the Georgia Tech cleanroom, “we need a prototyping facility to enable large-scale, array-level demonstration for new memory technologies,” he said. “The PRC is going to help us get there, packaging our prototype into a complete system.”

“The PRC enables the heterogeneous integration of our new device technologies with commercial off-the-shelf silicon chips from commercial foundries,” he added.

Yu said his in-memory compute breakthrough is creating excitement among both traditional chip makers and non-traditional companies looking to build their own silicon chips such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla.

***

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Writer: Anne Wainscott-Sargent 

Georgia Tech researchers have created a material that acts like a second skin layer and is up to 200% more stretchable than its original dimension without significantly losing its electric current. The researchers say the soft flexible photodetectors could enhance the utility of medical wearable sensors and implantable devices, among other applications. The research will be published on Dec. 15 in the journal Science Advances.   

Georgia Tech researchers from both mechanical and computing engineering labs collaborated over three years to demonstrate a new level of stretchability for a photodetector, a device made from a synthetic polymer and an elastomer that absorbs light to produce an electrical current. 

Photodetectors today are used as wearables for health monitoring, such as rigid fingertip pulse oximeter reading devices. They convert light signals into electrical ones and are commonly used on wearable electronics.

Stretchable like a Rubber Band

Given that conventional flexible semiconductors break under a few percentages of strain, the Georgia Tech findings are “an order-of-magnitude improvement,” said Olivier Pierron, professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, whose lab measures the mechanical properties and reliability of flexible electronics under extreme conditions.

“Think of a rubber band or something that's soft and stretchable like human skin yet has similar electrical semiconducting properties of solid or rigid semiconductors,” said Canek Fuentes-Hernandez, a co-PI formerly in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and now an associate professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston. “We’ve shown that you can build stretchability into semiconductors that retains the electrical performance needed to detect light levels that are around hundred million times fainter than produced by a light bulb used for indoor illumination,” he said.

Extraordinary Tenacity and Teamwork  

Bernard Kippelen, vice provost for International Initiatives and an ECE professor, oversaw the work of Youngrak Park, the study’s first author and a Ph.D. candidate in ECE.  Following two-and-a-half years of research, Park uncovered the right combination of chemical compounds that produced a super-soft material with the ability to generate and conduct electricity when exposed to light.  

Park found the perfect ratio for all parts of the semiconductor layer to maintain high performance in the photodetector. But it was painstaking work to prove the materials’ stretchability, especially given that a single layer was 1,000 times thinner than a human hair.

Park relied on Kyungjin Kim, then a Georgia Tech Ph.D. mechanical engineering student, to test the material’s reliability. He continued to provide Kim with larger, thicker samples until one with a thickness of 500 nanometers worked. 

“It was still super thin. Under dry conditions, it would just crumble. We had to use a water reservoir to keep its shape,” recalled Kim, now an assistant professor in the University of Connecticut’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Elaborating on how difficult it was to measure pure mechanical properties of a photoactive layer, Pierron noted, “Electronic devices are very brittle typically, which is okay with conventional devices fabricated on rigid substrates. But as soon as you use soft substrates that becomes an issue.”

The water acted like plastic wrap keeping the thin films in place without crumbling or losing shape, enabling the researchers to stretch the material and measure its mechanical properties.

To test for electrical signals coming out of the device under illumination, electronic terminals had to be embedded on it. Yet, those terminals had to be deformable, too, or the entire device would become rigid.

“Fabricating stretchable electronic terminals was a major challenge in and of itself,” said ECE PhD graduate Felipe Andres Larrain, who worked closely with Park and focused on the embedded components.  He is now an assistant professor at Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile.

While this breakthrough material has been initially integrated into a photodetector and tested for electrical functionality, more testing and optimization is needed to show the materials’ stretchability  under multimodal loads and its shelf stability.

“What's exciting is what these materials and the devices will enable us to develop―namely, the concept of intelligence systems. You have functional surfaces that combine sensors that monitor all kinds of physical properties,” said Graham, former chair of the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and now Dean of Engineering at the University of Maryland.

“This is a very good example of interdisciplinary research — none of this work would have been possible without the collaboration between electrical and mechanical engineers,” Kippelen said. “In the lab we didn’t have any prior experience with stretchable materials. Figuring out how to measure this took a lot of perseverance, creativity and hard work.”

New Smart Applications Possible

The researchers are most excited about the potential of the material to enhance medical wearables. Typically, wristwatches that use rigid biosensors have limitations since flexing the wrist can completely change the sensor’s measurements. They are subject to “motion artifact,” or degraded image quality, caused when a person moves.

“Moving around can drastically affect the usability of collected data but being able to reposition devices on the body to minimize or eliminate motion artifact is a big deal,” noted Gabriel Cahn, a project manager for Huxley Medical, a biosensor startup in Atlanta, who recently graduated from Georgia Tech with a doctorate in flexible electronics.  “Having electronics that can flex, twist, bend and conform to non-flat surfaces and move with your body will allow you to place these sensors in more advantageous places to collect biometric data. It will be infinitely more useful in helping diagnose or monitor existing medical illnesses.”

The research team foresees rich applications for the soft and stretchable polymer blend beyond wearables for health monitoring. “The soft device also could be attractive for implantable electronics for bio-electronic applications since the interfaces comply with the dynamic motion of the soft biological tissues, reducing the foreign body reaction,” said Kim.

“The potential is fantastic,” added Larrain. “In the long-term, you could develop sensors that could enhance or even replace the human eye or be applied to robotic eyes.”

Fuentes sees the material working in smart agriculture applications, where farmers could attach light sensors into fruits or other produce to monitor growth, disease and to better time harvesting.

Kippelen believes the rubber-like photodiodes that detect ultralow light levels could find applications in detecting, identifying, and characterizing ionizing radiation for nuclear fuel cycle monitoring.   

CITATION: Y. Park, et. all, “Skin-like Low-noise Elastomeric Organic Photodiodes.” (Science Advances, 2021) https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abj6565

***

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar and Natalie Stingelin will be inducted at the NAI Annual Meeting this coming June in Phoenix, Arizona. Election to NAI’s fellowship program is the highest professional distinction for academic inventors. 

Sivakumar, Georgia Tech’s first vice president of commercialization and chief commercialization officer, is being recognized for having demonstrated a highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society. He is a co-inventor on 22 issued patents, with 15 of them licensed to industry.

Sivakumar holds the Wayne J. Holman Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he has served as a faculty member since 2000.

The NAI is honoring Stingelin for her significant contributions in the broader area of polymer physics and organic electronics and photonics. This includes the advancement of novel strategies that enable processing and design of soft electronic materials (such as organic semiconductors and inorganic/organic hybrid materials) with unique functional properties and the creation of innovative device architectures.

Stingelin holds a joint appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. She is an internationally recognized authority in the polymer field and serves as the director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics. Stingelin is also an initiative lead for Georgia Tech’s Institute of Materials.

Sivakumar and Stingelin are among 164 honorees from more than 100 research universities and governmental and non-profit institutions worldwide.

Jupiter’s atmosphere has a system of zones and belts punctuated by small and large vortices, the largest being the Great Red Spot. How these features change with depth is unknown, with theories of their structure ranging from shallow meteorological features to surface expressions of deep-seated convection. Steffes and his colleagues present observations of atmospheric vortices using the Juno spacecraft’s Microwave Radiometer. They found vortex roots that extend deeper than the altitude at which water is expected to condense, and they identified density inversion layers. Their results constrain the three-dimensional structure of Jupiter’s vortices and their extension below the clouds.

Juno began its five-year-long journey to Jupiter when it launched from Kennedy Space Center on August 5, 2011. It has been circling Jupiter since entering its orbit on July 4, 2016. Slated to continue through September 2025 or through the end of the spacecraft’s life–whichever comes first, the mission will not only continue key observations of Jupiter, but also will expand its investigations to the larger Jovian system including Jupiter's rings and large moons, with targeted observations and close flybys planned of the moons Ganymede, Europa, and Io. 

To learn more, read the paper on the Science website.

Like many Americans growing up in his era, Marshall Bronston was awed and inspired by the Apollo 11 space mission, culminating in the first man walking on the moon. A young Bronston didn’t set a life goal of becoming an astronaut. Still, the lunar mission did figuratively carry him on a professional and personal ascent that continues to reach new heights to this day.

“I'm actually a failure ... never got to be an astronaut,” Bronston jokingly quipped. “But I hope that I've done some good things.”

“Some” good things is an understatement. Throughout his life, Bronston, a principal research engineer at the Tucson, Ariz., field office of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), has accomplished much as a fighter pilot, a leader, and an engineer.

Achieving ESEP Certification

As an engineer, Bronston recently reached one of the highest heights possible. He earned the Expert Systems Engineering Professional (ESEP) certification through the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). In doing so, he became one of only slightly more than 300 systems engineers worldwide to attain that level of confirmation of their systems engineering competency, demonstrated knowledge, education, and experience.

ESEP certification is for those system engineers who have distinguished themselves by demonstrating substantial experience and technical leadership. The ESEP has a broader and deeper experience in performing and leading systems engineering than the Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP), which is a prerequisite for ESEP certification. According to INCOSE, in order to achieve ESEP certification, applicants must have at least twenty years of systems engineering experience and be “the person others seek with specific, challenging, technical questions.”

The ESEP certification serves as a mile marker for Bronston’s long and still-ascending career.

Enacting GTRI’s Mission Through Research and Education

Bronston joined GTRI in August 2009. Working under the auspices of the Systems Engineering Research Division of the Electronic Systems Laboratory (ELSYS), he developed concepts, programs, and systems to increase combat force effectiveness and survivability. Bronston’s work at GTRI includes leading multiple engineering teams to improve the cybersecurity of military networks, test and evaluation of a variety of aircraft platform and tactics-related improvements, and new test and evaluation methods and processes.

He was the lead systems engineer for the Computer Adaptive Network Defense-in-Depth Joint Capability Technology Demonstration, resulting in the Virtual Secure Enclaves security upgrade to U.S. Navy and Joint computer networks. Also, Bronston was co-project director for a team of 30 electronic warfare (EW) subject matter experts that developed a 14-month resident curriculum for EW reprogramming and multiple other short course variants of the knowledge generated by the team.

In addition, he is the lead instructor for the Georgia Tech College of Engineering’s signature course in graduate-level systems engineering and the Fundamentals of Cybersecurity Test and Evaluation short course, offered through Georgia Tech Professional Education.

Bronston is an in-person example of several facets of GTRI’s mission, such as to:

• Serve National Security.
• Improve the human condition.
• Educate future technology leaders.

The latter point is one Bronston continually stresses. His ascent to ESEP certification demonstrates his commitment to personal educational growth. GTRI’s emphasis on continuing education is something that attracted this career warfighter to the Institute.

“We value curiosity, and GTRI is a place where the learning never stops. Since coming to GTRI, I took advantage of the [Professional Master's in Applied Systems Engineering] PMASE program to deep-dive into topics that were inspiring to me,” he said. “And, as a result, I learned about things like artificial intelligence, neural networks, modeling, and simulation systems thinking.”

“And what is it I like about GTRI? We value curiosity, and investing in each of us is a cultural norm that I very much embrace.”

Learning From Others

Bronston claims he learns from his colleagues at GTRI and humbly name-dropped them throughout the interview.

“I'm absolutely stunned by the impressive people around me: leaders like [ELSYS Research Engineers] Jason Stroup, Mike Shearin, Jeremy Doerr, Debra Jones, Ph.D., [and] Santiago Balestrini, Ph.D. They're just a few of the ‘all-stars’ that I get to learn from on a daily basis.”

“I'm a curious guy, and everybody around me in GTRI is teaching me something, whether or not they know it, or I reveal that to them. I'm taking notes on all these people that are way smarter than I am. It's like a continuous learning opportunity for me. I get motivated by people who make continuous learning a way of life; people like [ELSYS Principal Research Engineer] Andy Register, Ph.D.”

Bronston enthusiastically recommends continuous learning and professional development and notes one needn’t follow the same “flight path” he took as he moved throughout his career.

“GTRI is one of those places that puts a value on and invests in each person,” he said. “It's a great match for anybody that would like to continually grow.”

“I would recommend each person continue their own path to improvement: that might be a short course, a habit of hitting the CRC [Georgia Tech’s Campus Recreation Center] at 6 a.m., or it might be pursuing the dream of an advanced degree or a certification like CSEP [Certified Systems Engineering Professional] or ESEP.”

Remaining humble, Bronston said that his ultimate goal to cap off his career is “I want to leave behind successful teams that don't need me anymore.” He said he acquired that goal from the examples of others who came before him.

“I'm standing on the shoulders of giants--people like [former GTRI Director] Steve Cross, Ph.D., [GTRI Washington field office manager] Bob Beasley, and [executive director, Professional Master's Degree in Applied Systems Engineering] Carlee Bishop, Ph.D.

“I'd like to set a good example to help us (GTRI) grow those that are going to lead us into the future.”

*****

Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,800 employees supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performs more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry. Learn more at https://www.gtri.gatech.edu/ and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. 

Writer: Christopher Weems

Photographer: Lt. Col. Greg Woodrow, USAF

Active exosuits that incorporate electronics and powered motors are yet to be broadly applied. They tend to be big and heavy, and rely on rigid exoskeletons to transfer weight from body to ground. Exoskeletons add a great deal of stiffness, as well, Young said. Putting on most active exosuits is a little like becoming one with a forklift, restricting a wearer to lifting weights in a vertical plane.

For all these reasons, Young’s Asymmetric Back eXosuit (ABX) described in the October 5 issue of IEEE Transactions on Robotics is highly non-standard. There’s no exoskeleton, no rigid structure, nothing that makes contact with the floor. If the wearer is just standing there, it does nothing except for adding 14 pounds to their legs. But if they raise their body from a leaning over position, it makes a somewhat frantic noise: that is the sound of the ABX helping them rotate their torso, helping them twist. 

Although most active exosuits support vertical lifts, rotating and twisting movements are also ubiquitous, especially in certain fields of manual labor like garbage collection and baggage handling. In many cases, these motions can be awkward and strenuous, leading to work-related injuries as well as back pain, according to Young. Back pain, in turn, is directly correlated with the strength of compressive forces and shear forces that are applied to the spine.

In designing their exosuit, the researchers sought a way to reduce these loads on the spinal joints. Putting it on looks a little like donning a futuristic backpack. Two motors are first strapped onto the back of each upper thigh. These motors are then connected to the back of the opposite shoulders, each with their own cable, making for two cables that diagonally overlap. The exosuit provides assistance by applying tension to the cables when it detects a wearer rise from a bending posture.

“It's definitely a different sensation than a sort of standard exoskeleton. It's not your standard design,” said Young. 

Because the diagonal cables have a component of motion that is horizontal, they exert a pull on the torso that can aid in twisting it from side to side. In tests, the researchers showed that when a wearer of the ABX swung a weight from the ground to one side, the exosuit reduced their back muscle activations by an average of 16%, as measured by electromyography (EMG) sensors. The exosuit also provided a 37% reduction in back muscle exertion when a wearer lifted weights symmetrically, straight off the ground – an assistance level comparable to more rigid designs. 

“People definitely felt like the technology is assisting them, which is great. And we did see the concurrent EMG reduction,” said Young. “I think it’s a great first step.”

In a sense, wearing the exosuit is almost like strapping two additional muscles onto the body – unconventional muscles, which run directly from back to leg. Interestingly, it is the positioning of these muscles rather than their brute strength that makes them functional, said Young.

The motors pull the cables with much less power than the muscles in the body. However, the cables are positioned much further away from the joints. Through this positioning, the cables obtain greater leverage and mechanical advantage, allowing the wearer to reduce their overall muscular output and hence the load that they place on their spine. (Spinal loading was not directly measured in the study.)

Aside from its overall performance, it is the flexible, asymmetric nature of the suit that really makes it unique, Young said. There are currently no other active exosuits that provide assistance for twisting and rotating through a comparable range of motion. While other exosuits also use cables, none have arranged them along diagonal lines.

Young is currently seeking collaborations with industry partners to further develop the exosuit. In future work, he sees its control system as a point to improve. Currently, when a person raises their torso from a lowered position, the cables simply pull with constant tension. But it should be possible to make the system detect different actions of the wearer and adjust its pull in response.

References

J. M. Li, D. D. Molinaro, A. S. King, A. Mazumdar and A. J. Young, "Design and Validation of a Cable-Driven Asymmetric Back Exosuit," in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, doi: 10.1109/TRO.2021.3112280.

About Georgia Tech

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

The award will establish a network of 12 sites around the United States, including locations in national parks and some of the country’s largest cities. Each will be outfitted with state-of-the-art instruments for characterizing the properties of aerosols. These sites will form what is officially called the Atmospheric Science and mEasurement NeTwork (ASCENT).

Data from ASCENT will allow researchers to address a variety of questions about how the composition and abundance of aerosols are changing, such as how the modernization of electrical production (coal to natural gas to renewable) and transportation (gasoline to electric vehicles) affect air pollution and climate-relevant variables.

“This is an incredibly exciting opportunity,” said Ng, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “ASCENT represents a key advancement in atmospheric measurement infrastructure in the U.S. For the first time, we will be able to acquire comprehensive, high time-resolution, long-term characterization of aerosols over a wide range of geographical regions. ASCENT will provide the critical, fundamental knowledge for informing science-based decisions on climate change, air quality, and minimizing inequalities in air pollution exposure.”

ASCENT will also advance understanding of the adverse health impacts of PM_2.5 (particulate matter with a diameter smaller than 2.5 micrometers). Exposure to PM_2.5 has been associated with cardiopulmonary diseases and millions of deaths per year.

“ASCENT's long-term, advanced chemical composition and particle size measurements will facilitate transformative studies to unravel specific aerosol types and properties responsible for their adverse health effects,” Ng said. “This will contribute to building a foundation to define future regulations in the U.S. for protecting public health, as aerosol sources and properties continue to evolve in a changing world.”

Aerosols impact climate by changing the Earth’s energy balance via direct absorption or scattering of solar radiation and altering the albedo (surface reflection), formation of clouds, and precipitation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment established that the aerosol effects represent the single largest source of uncertainty in understanding climate change.

According to NSF, ASCENT will also allow U.S. researchers to remain competitive in a global research environment. The 2016 National Academies report on The Future of Atmospheric Chemistry Research emphasized the critical need for long-term atmospheric chemistry measurements, recommending that the NSF take the lead to establish synergies with existing sites.

Currently, several aerosol monitoring networks exist in the United States, but none have the capability of measuring aerosol chemical and physical properties at high time-resolution (highly regular intervals of measurement, in the order of minutes).

The ASCENT network’s 12 sites across the United States are strategically located in rural, urban, and remote sites that have pre-existing infrastructure for atmospheric monitoring. Five ASCENT sites are in the National Core Network (NCore), which is a subset of the Chemical Speciation Network (CSN). Four rural sites are in the Interagency Monitoring of PROtected Visual Environment (IMPROVE) network. Other ASCENT sites are located in NSF’s National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) in California, and the Houston Network of Environmental Towers (HNET) in Texas.

Each site will be equipped with four advanced instruments: an Aerosol Chemical Speciation Monitor (ACSM, non-refractory aerosols), Xact (trace metals), Aethalometer (black/brown carbon), and Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer (SMPS, aerosol number size distribution and concentration).

The sites include: Delta Junction, Alaska; Cheeka Peak/Makah, Washington; Los Angeles/Pico Rivera, California; Rubidoux, California; Joshua Tree National Park, California; Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming; Denver, Colorado; Houston, Texas; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; and Great Smoky Mountain National Park, Tennessee.

On the education and outreach side of the project, ASCENT has specific recruitment, mentoring, training, and career development plans for graduate and undergraduate students, with an emphasis on underrepresented groups. One of the ASCENT locations is on tribal land and the project will train tribal air quality staff and perform outreach to interested tribal members. ASCENT will also provide training and educational opportunities for the state agency and National Park Service site operators.

In collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a comprehensive database and web interface will be developed to provide research communities, educators, policy makers, the public, etc. with free and open access to all ASCENT data.

In addition to lead principal investigator (PI) Ng, co-PIs on the ASCENT project include Professor Armistead Russell of Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Professor Roya Bahreini of the University of California-Riverside, and Professor Ann Dillner of the University of California-Davis, with Senior Research Scientist Christina Higgins of the Georgia Tech Research Institute serving as project manager.

Other ASCENT partner institutions and academics include the University of Alaska Fairbanks (Professor Jingqiu Mao), University of Washington (Professor Joel Thornton), California Institute of Technology (Professor John Seinfeld), Harvey Mudd College (Professor Lelia Hawkins), University of Wyoming (Professor Shane Murphy), University of Colorado Boulder (Professor Jose Jimenez), Roger Williams University (Professor Robert Griffin), University of Houston (Professor James Flynn), Carnegie Mellon University (Professors Allen Robinson and Albert Presto), Yale University (Professor Drew Gentner), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Professor Jason Surratt), and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (Jeff de La Beaujardiere and Eric Nienhouse).

Ng said: “I look forward to working with the team and the greater atmospheric community to build this amazing network and all the new and exciting research opportunities that ASCENT will enable for the many years to come.”

Georgia Tech researchers have been meeting with the choreographer, Troy Schumacher, and the ballet company for the last year and a half to shape the concept, which explores ideas at the forefront of mechanical interventions into the human body and mind.

“I think the arts can be a really powerful way to bring people from all backgrounds into a conversation about science and technology,” said Chris Rozell, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering who has worked on the project since its genesis. “My goal is to facilitate that conversation by helping to translate between the scientists doing amazing work and the artists who are approaching these ideas from the perspective of making something beautiful.”  

Georgia Tech Arts and TMBT have dubbed the project the “Grand Neuroethics Challenge.”

“A lot of the concepts, technologies, research, and ethics we've been discussing in this work are extremely complicated, but what's come through for me is that a lot of their work is going to have profound implications for the future of humanity,” said Schumacher. “So, for this ballet, I've decided to focus on the emotional relationship to brain-machine interfaces, while touching on what I've learned so far. I've spent most of my career collaborating with artists with little to no relationship to dance, but nothing quite as complex and fascinating as this.”

Aaron Shackelford, director of Georgia Tech Arts, said the project is a worthwhile endeavor because it offers a case study as to the importance of collaboration between artists and researchers, while demonstrating the importance of the arts in the mission and strategic plan of Georgia Tech.

“We recognize that the arts are critical to championing innovation and creativity at Georgia Tech,” said Shackelford. “Our mission is to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The arts — and artists — provide a vital avenue for pursuing this work. This project illuminates the impact of artists and researchers coming together to mutually inspire and learn from each other, while inviting audiences to participate in the discussions about their discoveries.”

“As a director coming from an arts/dance background and facilitator to this project, I have become fascinated with the work of the scientists during the conceiving/creation process and how this gets interwoven into the choreography and dancers’ bodies,” said John Welker, TMBT’s artistic director. “In any collaboration, there are surprises that are part of my joy for discovery, but this particular process has made me so much more aware and appreciative of the intimate connection between our minds' intention and how that is carried out through the movement of our bodies.”

This Friday will be more than a dance performance. It will also include talks from the researchers involved in the project and opportunities for audience to ask questions. Rozell will discuss his work on AI and its applications in treating depression. Chethan Pandarinath, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech, will talk about his AI research and how the brain controls movement. They’ll be joined by Karen Rommelfanger, director of Emory’s Neuroethics Program.

Rommelfanger knows the field of neuroscience can introduce complex words and concepts. When mixed with dance, however, she sees the project as a powerful opportunity for audiences to engage with multiple modalities of sensation and comprehension.

“I believe neuroscience brings great hope and promise for humanity. But my fear is that the promise of the field will be undermined by a deterioration of trust related to a real and hyped threats of unconsidered ways neuroscience might interface with individuals and society,” said Rommelfanger.” My hope is that this project will invite audiences, including myself, to challenge and surface our unspoken values and assumptions about the brain and technologies that interface with it.”

Friday’s event starts at 8pm at the Ferst Center for the Arts. Tickets are just $10. The full work, which is made possible in part through a grant from the Charles Loridans Foundation, will premiere on campus next fall.

“I’m excited to see how something as abstract as the concepts in neuroscience, neurotechnology, and neuroethics can be translated into dance,” Rozell said. “As a researcher, we can get really caught up in the technical details. I can’t wait to see how those details turn into an overall impression that is both beautiful and gives us a new way to think about what we do.”

For the next year, the researchers will deliver daily fire impact forecasts to each school, while also installing air purifiers and low-cost air quality monitors. Data from those monitors will be broadcast in real-time inside and outside classrooms. The Georgia Tech team will also create new curricula for teachers and students that increase understanding of air pollutants, their sources, and mitigation measures. 

The Georgia Tech team consists of members in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE), School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS), and the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain.

“Air pollution leads to more premature deaths than virtually all other environmental exposures. In the Southeast, prescribed burning is a major source of air pollution: it releases more particulate matter into the air than cars, trucks, factories, and power plants,” said Armistead (Ted) Russell, the Howard T. Tellepsen Chair and Regents’ Professor in CEE. “Children in areas that experience prescribed burning smoke are uniquely vulnerable. We are excited to work with schools to identify effective measures that can be used to help protect schoolchildren.”

Russell and his colleagues have decades of experience studying emissions. His previous studies found that prescribed burns led to highly elevated emissions in southern Georgia, especially during the peak burn period from January to April. The research showed that the highest levels of unhealthy emissions — primary and secondary particulate matter — occur during school hours when burns are most active. However, Russell also found that elevated levels linger into the evening, long after the fires are extinguished.

Russell also found a communications gap that helped him create the new initiative.

“Schools are very good at providing information to parents about health-related interventions. Families serve as important communication channels,” Russell said. “However, schools are infrequently used to disseminate information about fire emissions. Incorporating teachers and students into a communications strategy has the potential to reduce exposure to children and the school’s broader community.”

The award will allow Russell and CEE Principal Research Engineer Talat Odman to expand Georgia Tech’s Southern Integrated Prescribed Fire Information System (SIPFIS), which they helped create in 2015. The tool merges prescribed fire and air quality data into a common analysis framework, providing a unified prescribed fire database for the southern U.S. That data is primarily used by forest and air quality managers. SIPFIS will now be tweaked to also provide daily forecasts to the schools.

Forecast and information products and lessons learned from the one-year project will be shared with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its health partners.

The initiative will be coupled with outcomes from a $2.3 million Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program project that is currently being led by Odman. His team is measuring and modeling air quality impacts from prescribed burning at Fort Benning, which is adjacent to Columbus and across the border from Phenix City.

“By focusing on both the source of smoke, such as burns at Ft. Benning, and the effects on nearby schools, we can have a more complete understanding of the air quality impacts of prescribed fires,” said Odman. “This will allow us to develop strategies to minimize exposure to smoke, while also helping to protect the health of people and forests.”

The EPA and DoD projects will further a third project: Russell’s NASA-funded work that is utilizing satellite products in SIPFIS for predicting smoke impacts on air quality and health. 

ChBE and EAS Associate Professor Sally Ng, who researches airborne particles, is also on the Georgia Tech team and will lead the deployment of the low-cost sensors at the schools. Rebecca Watts Hull, a community engagement specialist with the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain, is the fourth member of the team.   

“As wildfires become more frequent and severe, we are working to effectively communicate the risks of smoke exposure to impacted communities,” said Wayne Cascio, acting principal deputy assistant administrator for science in EPA’s Office of Research and Development. “We are seeing an increase in prescribed fires to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires; however, these are also a source of smoke exposure. The research we are funding will help develop strategies to prevent and reduce the health impacts of smoke from wildfires and prescribed fires.”

The project will begin in October.

Monitoring pneumonia remains a challenge because it manifests itself differently in almost every patient and can develop in any patient infected by coronavirus. The Georgia Institute of Technology is part of a team of engineers, data scientists, and medical clinicians led by the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin that has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation's ASCENT program. The purpose of this project is to develop a wearable device for patients with pneumonia, allowing medical personnel to track their progress remotely and use data to predict how their condition may change.

This project combines state-of-the-art technology across wearable devices, integrated circuits and machine learning. And the larger goal is to develop ways to safely monitor patients remotely and maintain high-quality care, wherever they are.

"We hope to solve this global challenge of achieving pervasive surveillance of patients, whether they're in the hospital, out in the world or quarantining at home in the midst of a pandemic," said Nanshu Lu, an associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG), who is leading the project.

The team was awarded $1.5 million over four years for the project, and the primary researchers include engineers, medical doctors, data scientists and more. They hope this interdisciplinary team will help knock down walls between specialties that keep medicine from advancing.

The researchers will make a hair-thin, skin-soft wireless wearable sensor, known as an electronic tattoo or “e-tattoo." This part of the project is led by Lu, who has been developing her e-tattoo technology for a decade at UT Austin.

An integrated system-on-chip will read out sensor signals and perform signal processing with ultra-low power consumption to ensure that patients can wear the device without interruption for at least a week on a single charge. Shaolan Li, an assistant professor in Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Ph.D. graduate from the Cockrell School, is handling this aspect of the project. 

Li noted that he and his team at Georgia Tech have previously developed a few sensor interface integrated circuits that are designed to read biomedical signals like ECG or EEG with record-setting energy efficiency. He also added that he wants to leverage this knowledge to expand all of the capabilities of this new wearable device, aiming to profoundly advance the engagement of wearable electronics in clinical medicine. “Through this project, we really hope to showcase that the circuit technology innovation developed in our lab can truly address the most pressing problems that are facing humanity,” said Li. 

A deep learning framework will be tailored to analyze all the data coming from the e-tattoo and predict how clinical condition progresses with evolution of the disease. Hongyu Miao, associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, is leading the data science work and developing the deep learning tool.

And all this information will be managed through Sickbay, an FDA-approved virtual patient monitoring platform. Craig Rusin, associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine and head of the Predictive Analytics Lab at Texas Children’s Hospital, developed Sickbay. The program is used by hospitals across the country, including Texas Children’s, and he started the company Medical Informatics to commercialize it.

Parag Jain, a pediatric critical care physician at Texas Children’s Hospital and assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, will lead a clinical trial of the device. Using deep machine learning techniques, he will develop algorithms that can predict the progression of pneumonia using historical data.  Once a prototype device is ready, likely in two to three years, the team will test it on 20 patients at Texas Children’s Hospital, aged 13 to 18 years, with progressive pneumonia.

The researchers targeted pneumonia for this project because it is a common illness, one that can be very dangerous, regardless of age or health status. As a side effect of not just COVID-19, but other respiratory viruses and bacteria, it is also quite prevalent. It also requires individualized care because each patient progresses differently.

The multi-faceted nature of the team illustrates the complexity of the problem they are trying to tackle. They are aiming to solve a challenging engineering problem as well as real-world issues with patient care.

Despite tremendous advances in medical technology, tools to continuously track and analyze all the data patients generate remain lacking. That often means that clinicians are only getting small snapshots of patients' condition, not the full picture.

This continuous monitoring and data analysis will allow medical personnel to use their time more wisely, to check in on patients at the most important moments. In critical cases of pneumonia, timing is everything, and the right treatment at the right time can make the difference between life and death.

"The pandemic really exposed gaps in care that patients with severe disease have to be treated using bulky, constrained, conventional monitors," Lu said. "We need sensors with ‘brains’ that can tell doctors when the time is right for that critical intervention, whether the patient is in a hospital bed just a few steps away or in their own home."