"Solid Materials Discovery for Thin Films, Oxide Catalysts, and Polymer" by Benjamin Ruiz-Yi

Date of Award

Summer 2020

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Chemical Engineering

First Advisor

Jochen Lauterbach

Abstract

Solid materials are made up of multiple classes, including metals, ceramics, and polymers. While each class can be developed for general purpose applications or highly specialized, discovery of new materials in order to improve upon desired properties is a non-trivial task for any type of material. A wide variety of materials encompass expansive design spaces, consisting of parameters such as chemical compositions, synthesis conditions, and post-processing. Due to this, narrowing down the design space to fit within a given figure-of-merit and economic viability becomes time consuming at best and infeasible at worst. High-throughput experimentation

High-throughput experimentation (HTE) is a methodology that can mitigate the difficulties that come with materials discovery. It allows for accelerated exploration of wide parameter spaces by utilizing rapid serial or parallelization synthesis and characterization methods. This generates large data sets that, upon further analysis, can pinpoint regions of interest within a design space for further study. Outside of HTE methods for materials discovery, a statistical design of experiments (DOE) can be conducted in order to minimize the number of experiments needed to sufficiently model and optimize the properties and performance of a given material system.

Various materials were investigated for different applications. HTE was utilized in order to understand the phase stabilization mechanisms of multi-principal element alloys (MPEA) and also to aid in the discovery of oxidation resistant alloy materials. Additionally, two stabilized zirconia systems were studied via thin-film deposition in order to capture specific phase for high-temperature applications. A ceria supported rhenia catalyst was characterized with various spectrographic techniques in order to determine its surface structure. Finally, a thiol-ene curable sealant was optimized using a response surface DOE in order to find conditions that optimize the adhesive strength of the material. vii

Rights

© 2020, Benjamin Ruiz-Yi

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