PREM: Collaborative Research and Education in Energy Materials (CREEM)

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University is a large public HBCU and leads the nation in numbers of undergraduate, masters, and doctoral engineering degrees awarded to African Americans. The University is also the leading producer of African American female engineers at the baccalaureate level. The aim of the NSF Partnership for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) between NCAT and the Cornell Center of Materials Research (CCMR), an NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Cornell University is to broaden the participation of underrepresented minority (URM) students and faculty members in renewable energy research and to create opportunities for graduate studies in materials research at NCAT and Cornell.

Providing clean and renewable energy is among the most critical challenges of the 21st century. Overcoming the energy challenge requires new conversion technologies that can meet the growing global energy demand. This PREM includes innovative concepts to increase the participation of URM students in materials research such as reciprocal exchange of students and faculty members, development of new courses in the field of energy, creation of research opportunities for K-16 students/teachers, and keeping the public informed about the advances in materials research and technology.

The NCAT-CCMR PREM seed team has formulated a research plan to develop low-dimensional (LD) titanium oxynitride (TiNO)-based materials capable of supporting energy conversion reactions. The project will also develop a fundamental understanding of materials’ physical and chemical properties across different length scales. The attraction of TiNO over more widely studied transition metal oxides is rooted in the polarizability, electronegativity, and anion charge of nitrogen versus that of oxygen, which induces an enormous change in the physical and chemical properties of the resulting compounds.

The LD material research begins with a baseline thin-film synthesis, advancing to the more complicated synthesis of zero-and one-dimensional structures of titanium oxynitrides. Controlled modification in the electronic structure of the titanium oxynitride realized by changing the oxygen content as well as by manipulating its geometry and size will allow the production of materials with tunable conductivity and energy gap.

The proposed research will establish the effectiveness of thin film-based methods for the synthesis of TiNO materials in epitaxial 2D, 1D, and 0D geometries. The convenience of making TiNO multilayers by merely changing the oxygen pressure during the growth, with each layer differing in the oxygen content and consequently bandgap, may prove to be a gateway capability in the fabrication of TiNO thin-film devices free from any organic layers for visible-light-harvesting applications.

Dissemination of both research and education findings of the PREM seed project will involve open-access and traditional journals, conferences and a strong social media presence.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.