INNOVATION PROFILE:Materials and Surface Science Institute, University of Limerick
MORE EFFICIENT and cheaper solar cells, early detection of Alzheimer’s disease, new more easily visible stents, lighter aircraft bodies, and ensuring a drug is manufactured in precisely the right form to have its desired effect in the body. This seemingly highly disparate activities share at least two things in common – the first is that they are all related in some way to materials science, and the second is that they are all areas of research currently being pursued at the University of Limerick’s Materials and Surface Science Institute (MSSI).
Established in 1998, the MSSI now involves a group of some 200 researchers in the examination of the design of materials used in various ways in areas such as the pharmaceutical, airline and transport, medical and healthcare, energy, and ICT industries from the atomic to the macroscopic scale, providing new materials, processes and applications, which are guided by a fundamental understanding of material properties and design requirements.
Since its inception, MSSI has enjoyed a strong track record in collaborating with industry on materials research and development projects with researchers actively engaging with 35 companies ranging from Irish SMEs to global multinationals. It is also host to the Enterprise Ireland competence centre in composite materials with seven industry partners and the Solid State Pharmaceutical Cluster with 10 industry partners.
“Everything has materials in it, so our research has quite a wide range of applications”, MSSI director Prof Noel O’Dowd points out. “We specialise in a number of strategic areas including pharmaceutical materials, composite materials, biomedical applications, and the energy and environmental spheres.”
The pharmaceutical research is carried out by the Solid State Pharmaceutical Cluster. “We don’t get involved in the drug discovery process”, O’Dowd explains. “We look at the formulation of the tablet itself and how best the drug can be crystallised from its liquid form to a sold drug.”
Most of the drugs we take are in powder or crystalline form. Crystals can vary, and although this might only be apparent under a microscope, the differences can influence how a drug is taken up by the body. Although drugs may be chemically the same, how they are presented usually determines when, where, and how they will be absorbed.
“The chemical composition of the active ingredient may be exactly the same but its form can have a significant impact on the way it acts in the body. We work with the pharmaceutical to solve the problem of getting drugs into the right form,” says O’Dowd.
A large field of research for the institute is in composite materials. “These are typically fibre reinforced composites which have a wide range of applications across a variety of industries include the automotive and aerospace sectors”, he explains.
Composites are materials that combine different ingredients to come up with often surprising properties in terms of strength and weight. Carbon-fibre technology is probably the most well known example. Incredibly small fibres of carbon just seven millionths of a metre thick are embedded in epoxy resin or another binding material.
The result is an extremely light and strong material which is very attractive to companies in areas like aircraft manufacturing. Today, both Boeing and Airbus are using carbon-fibre in their latest airliners.
“BMW is engaged in the development of an electric car where the body will be made almost 100 per cent from composite materials,” says O’Dowd. “With the batteries being so heavy they have to reduce the weight of the vehicle as much as possible. Also, these materials are increasingly being used for things like wind turbine blades and in the sports arena for yacht hulls and so on. We are working with companies such as Bombardier and others on solutions to cutting-edge problems.”
An area of high importance of the Irish economy is biomedical engineering with so many multinational companies from that sector located here. “We are looking at the development of new materials for medical devices”, O’Dowd explains. “The development of new alloys for stents, for example. One of the problems with some materials at the moment is that they are not easy to see on an X-ray and this can make it difficult to monitor their performance. We have been working on the development of a new alloy which will have all of the performance characteristics of the one it is replacing but will be easier to visualise on an X-ray.”
Also in the broad medical device arena is the development of a nanoscope which will allow the screening of patient cells for Alzheimer’s disease. At present there is no test to screen for this disease. A team based at MSSI is leading a European consortium that is developing the nanoscope.
“Early detection of Alzheimer’s is critical in developing effective treatments for the disease and there is currently no test available. Our technique would be able to detect Alzheimer’s-related amyloid plaques in the early stage with much more detail”, says lead scientist Dr Syed Tofail.
The prototype developed will be easy to use, flexible and allow direct imaging of the chemistry and the structure of very small features. The technique uses infra-red radiation as a source of detection but breaks away from its physical diffraction limit so as to see features as small as 70 nanometers in lateral dimension, which is comparable to the size of a virus.
In the therapeutic area, a novel medical device technology to treat narrowed or obstructed blood vessels invented by MSSI researchers has now been licensed to Irish-owned medical devices company, Clada Medical. It is hoped that device will improve success rates in angioplasty procedures which involve the mechanical widening of narrowed blood vessels.
During angioplasty particles of the fatty deposits can become dislodged and enter the blood stream which can block other arteries. Embolic protection devices are often used to capture and remove the dislodged fatty deposits. “This device combines angioplasty balloon and embolic protection technologies allowing for continuous blood flow during the procedure. In practice, this means the angioplasty balloon can be left in a full inflated state in the artery for a longer period of time than is currently possible. This will increase the efficiency of the angioplasty procedure and offers significant potential as a platform for drug-device combinations”, says Dr Michael Walsh, principal investigator and lead inventor.
In the energy and environment field one of the main lines of research is the discovery and development of innovative new solar energy conversion materials. “We are looking for replacement materials for silicon in photovoltaic cells”, O’Dowd points out. “Silicon is very expensive and we are using nanotechnology to make a cheaper alternative.”
The research project recently received further government support through a €700,000 Science Foundation Ireland grant.
Solar is responsible for only 1 per cent of the world’s energy requirements and this is primarily due to the high cost of production of efficient photovoltaic cells. The most sought after alternative materials for solar energy conversion are copper-indium- galium-disulfide (CIGS) and di-copper-zinc-tin-tetrasulphide (CZTS). By combining the four elements in each material in the correct combination, very high conversion of solar energy to electricity can be obtained. The barrier to application is that current methods of making these materials requires very expensive technologies but this has now been solved at MSSI.
Lead researcher, Dr Kevin Ryan, explains; “We have developed a low-cost laboratory method of forming both CIGS and CZTS in nanorod form which can maximise solar absorption; 250 billion of these rods for example will fit on the head of a pin and our technology allows us process these as an ink to form densely packed forests of these nanorods over very large areas optimised to harness the abundant solar power available.”
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