Anne Stevens Assistant Professor Jill Wenderott has received a five-year NSF-CAREER award for her project “Entropy-driven oxynitrides.”
This project will develop new ceramic materials known as visible-light-activated photocatalysts because they can use visible light to drive chemical reactions. Creation of these materials could lead to more efficient generation of useful, value-added products while supporting cleaner, more sustainable technologies.
These novel ceramic materials are exceptionally strong and possess tunable optical and electronic properties due to their unique atomic structure which is characterized by metal atoms and oxygen and nitrogen atoms replacing, switching, or mixing with one another. Researchers can take advantage of these unique structures to either encourage or discourage this type of atomic switching, and multi-element materials containing multiple metals and both oxygen and nitrogen are called “entropy-driven oxynitrides.”
This project will investigate how changing the different positively and negatively charged atoms within these materials affects their properties and performance. Additionally, because these materials are extremely underexplored, the project will also study how entropy-driven oxynitrides are formed during synthesis so the manufacturing process is better understood, which reduces waste and makes it easier to produce the materials on a larger scale.
In addition to advancing materials science, the project will expose a broad age range of students to functional inorganic materials science through low-cost, hands-on science kits (grades K-12) and focused research experiences and in-class learning related to materials for resiliency topics for both undergraduate and graduate students at Drexel University.