Sep 17 2010
A scientific article by researchers at North Dakota State University, Fargo, has been named one of the “Top-50 most cited articles” from 2007 to 2010, in the Journal of Aerosol Science published by Elsevier Science Ltd. The initial research covered in the article has led to an NDSU patent-pending technology that could be used in developing solar cells and printed electronics.
The article is titled “Aerosol focusing in micro-capillaries: Theory and experiment.” Its authors include Professor Iskander Akhatov, NDSU Department of Mechanical Engineering and faculty associate in NDSU’s Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE); Justin Hoey, CNSE research engineer and graduate student in mechanical engineering; Orven Swenson, associate professor, NDSU Department of Physics and CNSE faculty associate; and Doug Schulz, CNSE senior research scientist and adjunct professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
In the scientific article, NDSU researchers detail how they took mathematical models, applied them to a specific application not previously used, and verified the results through experiments. The results included research conducted by then-NDSU student Justin Hoey in his master’s degree thesis. As a student, Hoey worked at CNSE and later became a full-time research engineer at CNSE.
The initial research has since led to an NDSU patent-pending technology that could be used in solar cells, printed electronics, aerosol concentration, direct materials deposition, in-flight material processing, and any other application requiring an aerosol micro-beam. The NDSU-developed technology includes a unique nozzle designed for use on aerosol jet printing machines and similar systems which are used to print small lines and features on a substrate or base material, comparable to the way an ink-jet printer deposits lines on a page.
The nozzle uses a micro-capillary system capable of generating a tightly focused collimated aerosol beam (CAB) in which aerosol particles stay very close to the capillary center line as they leave the nozzle. This allows particles to be deposited on a substrate as a thin line or feature. This novel CAB nozzle allows for aerosol beams with consistent diameters as thin as 1 micron, and printed lines down to 5 microns in width. A micron is a millionth of a meter. In comparison, the diameter of human hair varies from about 40 microns to 120 microns.
The material covered in the Journal of Aerosol Science article is based on research sponsored by the Defense Microelectronics Activity under agreement numbers H94003-06-2-0601. Most-Cited Articles listed are based on data from Scopus.com, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources.
Source: http://www.ndsu.edu/