On the morning of September 27, faculty members and industry came together to discuss nanotechnology.

Supported by NSERC and co-hosted by MITACS, the NSERC Nanotechnology Connector Breakfast was a chance for U of T researchers – particularly engineering researchers – to connect with industry, and explore collaborative funding opportunities.

“It is a pleasure to be part of one of the first NSERC Connector events at U of T,” said Professor Peter Lewis, U of T’s Associate Vice-President (Research), who opened the event. “Nanotechnology is a research priority at U of T, and especially in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. The University strongly encourages new partnerships with industry, as it leverages new and successful ventures.”

Professor Stewart Aitchison (ECE), Vice-Dean, Research, and Director, Emerging Communications Technology Institute (ECTI), then gave an overview of the cutting-edge micro- and nano-fabrication facilities available at U of T’s ECTI – a workspace that makes nanotechnology-related research possible.

The guests – more than 20 industry representatives and 25 faculty members – were treated to presentations on Surface Interface Ontario’s facilities and services, NSERC’s Engage program, and its Collaborative Research and Development program, Mitacs’ industrial partnership programs, and more.

Professors Nazir Kherani (ECE, MSE), Joyce Poon (ECE) and Paul Santerre (Director, IBBME) touched on the impact nanotechnology has on their research areas – from energy, to information and communications technologies, to biology and biomedicine.

“I’m very pleased with the enthusiasm we saw for this event – from my colleagues in Engineering and from our industry contacts. They see the value of increased collaboration, and this event was designed to help make those connections,” said Professor Aitchison, “Sometimes there are specific technical problems that a university researcher can shed new light on, and sometimes there are commercialization prospects to explore. This was an opportunity to explore the beginnings of potentially fruitful collaborations.”

The Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering mourns the passing of Professor Emeritus Gordon R. Slemon (ECE).

Professor Slemon, who died on September 26 at age 87, served as Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering from 1966 to 1976, and Dean of U of T Engineering from 1979 to 1986.

He was highly regarded as the international authority on the analysis, design and development of electric machines and controlled drive systems. Throughout his career, Professor Slemon garnered countless honours, including being named Officer of the Order of Canada for his dedication to engineering education and research.

In 1990, he was awarded the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, which is given to those who have made outstanding contributions to the generation and utilization of power. Professor Slemon, an elected Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, authored more than 175 technical reports and publications, and served as an engineering consultant to more than 70 Canadian organizations. In 2011, he was recognized with the Engineering Institute of Canada’s highest honour, the Sir John Kennedy Medal.

“Professor Emeritus Gordon R. Slemon will be remembered as an extraordinary leader in engineering, who has been a tremendous influence on the profession and U of T Engineering,” said Dean Cristina Amon, “On behalf of the Faculty, I send my deepest condolences to his family.”

Researchers at the University of Victoria and U of T Engineering Professor David Sinton (MIE) will design a new fibre-optic system to monitor carbon dioxide (CO2) at underground storage sites.

Carbon Management Canada will provide the team with a $983,578 grant to research ways CO2 can be safely injected into storage formations, which has the potential to reduce harmful emissions from power generating stations that burn coal.

The three-year project, headed by the University of Victoria, will begin in the lab and then shift outdoors for field tests.

In designing a new system to monitor CO2 concentrations, the researchers will make use of patented fibre-optic technology, along with patented techniques to measure CO2 fluxes.

Carbon Management Canada is a Network of Centres of Excellence supported by federal and provincial governments as well as industry. CMC is a community of over 150 university researchers, and industry and government practitioners with the vision, the commitment, and the enthusiasm needed to take the upstream fossil energy industry to zero carbon emissions.

Professors Brenda McCabe (CivE), Kim Pressnail (CivE) and Ted Sargent (ECE), as well as CivE PhD candidates Marianne Touchie and Ekaterina Tzekova, have been named to the Clean50, an initiative by the Corporate Knights honouring outstanding contributors to sustainable development and clean capitalism in Canada.

Professors McCabe and Pressnail, along with Marianne Touchie and Ekaterina Tzekov, were recognized as a group for their creation of  The Promise. In 2009, Professor Pressnail found a document created by the Cousteau Society that described our obligations to future generations. Inspired, he shared it with students; two of whom, Tzekov and Touchie, took the lead in revising it for use by Engineers, resulting in The Promise. Tzekov and Touchie had earlier galvanized support in the Department for introducing sustainability as a theme across the course material, and had been the catalysts for its integration in the curricula. They engaged Professor Pressnail and Department Chair McCabe in the re-design of the document and in garnering support among students and faculty. In 2009, the group asked professors and graduating students to sign the pledge (81 did) and in 2010 expanded it to include alumni – adding 38 more signatories. In 2011, the effort expanded once again, this time to encourage practicing engineers to sign on. In all, there are now 177 engineers in Canada who have taken The Promise.

Over the past several years, Professor Sargent has made a number of research breakthroughs which are paving the way for the widespread use of solar cells as an energy source. In 2005, he invented the first paint-on solar cell to harvest the sun’s abundant infrared rays. He then improved over ten-thousand-fold the performance of his new class of devices. His breakthrough solar cell significantly reduced costs associated with solar energy by enabling simple spray-coating of his semiconductor onto nearly any surface. A few months ago, Professor Sargent made an additional breakthrough in solar cell technology, creating the first efficient tandem solar cell based on colloidal quantum dots (CQD). The device is a stack of two light-absorbing layers – one tuned to capture the sun’s visible rays, the other engineered to harvest the half of the sun’s power that lies in the infrared spectrum. This is the first CQD solar cell which absorbs both infrared rays and visible rays on the same cell.By capturing such a broad range of light waves, tandem CQD solar cells can in principle reach up to 42% efficiencies. In comparison, the best single-junction solar cells are constrained to a maximum of 31% efficiency.

“The naming of these engineers to the 2012 Clean50 demonstrates not only the contributions our community members are making to sustainability in Canada, but the diverse ways in which we can work towards this important goal,” said Cristina Amon, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.

The 2012 Clean50 will be honoured at the first annual Clean50 Summit at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club on the Toronto Islands on September 28.

Researchers from the University of Toronto (U of T), King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) and Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) have created the most efficient colloidal quantum dot (CQD) solar cell ever.

The discovery is reported in the latest issue of Nature Materials.

Quantum dots are nanoscale semiconductors that capture light and convert it into electrical energy. Because of their small scale, the dots can be sprayed onto flexible surfaces, including plastics. This enables the production of solar cells that are less expensive than the existing silicon-based version.

“We figured out how to shrink the wrappers that encapsulate quantum dots down to the smallest imaginable size – a mere layer of atoms,” states Professor Ted Sargent, corresponding author on the work and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology at U of T.

A crucial challenge for the field has been striking a balance between convenience and performance. The ideal design is one that tightly packs the quantum dots together. The greater the distance between quantum dots, the lower the efficiency.

Until now, quantum dots have been capped with organic molecules that separate the nanoparticles by a nanometer. On the nanoscale, that is a long distance for electrons to travel.

To solve this problem, the researchers utilized inorganic ligands, sub-nanometer-sized atoms that bind to the surfaces of the quantum dots and take up less space. The combination of close packing and charge trap elimination enabled electrons to move rapidly and smoothly through the solar cells, thus providing record efficiency.

“We wrapped a single layer of atoms around each particle. This allowed us to pack well-passivated quantum dots into a dense solid,” explains Dr. Jiang Tang, the first author of the paper who conducted the research while a post-doctoral fellow in The Edward S. Rogers Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at U of T.

“Our team at Penn State proved that we could remove charge traps – locations where electrons get stuck – while still packing the quantum dots closely together,” says Professor John Asbury of Penn State, a co-author of the work.

“At KAUST, we used visualization methods with sub-nanometer resolution and accuracy to investigate the structure and composition of the passivated quantum dots,” states co-author Professor Aram Amassian of KAUST in Saudi Arabia. “We proved that the inorganic passivants were tightly correlated with the location of the quantum dots and that it was the chemical passivation, rather than nanocrystal ordering, that led to the remarkable colloidal quantum dot solar cell performance,” he adds.

“It is very impressive that the team was able to make solar cells with power conversion efficiency up to 6% from quantum dots,” states Professor Michael McGehee of Stanford University, a world-renowned expert in solution-processed organic solar cells. “There is a lot of surface area in these films that could have dangling bonds which would hinder the performance of solar cells by creating traps states.

The team’s quantum dots had the highest electrical currents and the highest overall power conversion efficiency ever seen in CQD solar cells. The performance results were certified by an external laboratory, Newport, which is accredited by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

“This work proves the power of inorganic ligands in building practical devices,” states Professor Dmitri Talapin of The University of Chicago, a pioneer in inorganic ligands and materials chemistry. “This new surface chemistry provides the path toward both efficient and stable quantum dot solar cells. It should also impact other electronic and optoelectronic devices that utilize colloidal nanocrystals. Advantages of the all-inorganic approach include vastly improved electronic transport and a path to long-term stability.”

As a result of the potential of this research discovery, a technology licensing agreement has been signed by U of T and KAUST, brokered by MaRS Innovations (MI), which will enable the global commercialization of this new technology.

“The world – and the marketplace – need solar innovations that break the existing compromise between performance and cost. Through the partnership between U of T, MI and KAUST, we are poised to translate exciting research into tangible innovations that can be commercialized,” said Sargent.

Professor Birsen Donmez of the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering wants you to be a better driver. She’s thinking about sending you a report card.

Not really — but she is brainstorming ways to provide feedback to drivers on how they’re doing. She’s teamed up with Skymeter, a Canadian technology firm, to figure out how to measure driving style.

“I am interested in helping people be safer drivers by providing feedback to them based on how they drive,” she says. “If we can identify behaviours that are not safe and provide feedback to the driver in a consistent manner, then we might be able to change their behaviour in the long run.”

Her work has been given a big boost by funding from The Federal Economic Development Agency of Southern Ontario (FedDev). Peter Van Loan, leader of the government in the House of Commons was on campus today to announce funding for Professor Donmez’s project and 13 others.

We all get feedback when we drive — speeding tickets, perhaps even accidents. Professor Donmez wants to provide regular feedback that will prevent these more dramatic outcomes. Her work is in its early stages, so she doesn’t know yet whether it’s best to provide real time feedback, which would allow the driver to make corrections but could potentially be distracting, or to provide some kind of regular reporting.

Ben Grush is a member of the board of directors of Skymeter, a company that uses telemetrics — measuring from a distance — to measure automobile use. For example, Skymeter has installed meters to help car sharing companies measure and bill for usage. His company is interested in branching out and measuring driver behaviour. To extend the car-sharing example, Grush says, “Imagine it costs $15 to use a car for an hour. You might take the car shopping and only go a short distance. I might go a long distance and drive very aggressively. If we could measure that, we might pay differently depending on how we use the car.”

The goal for both Grush and Professor Donmez is a “driver style index.” Grush’s company has technology that can potentially make such a measurement by quantifying things like rapid acceleration or aggressive braking, but they don’t know how reliable it is.

“We needed help to develop this index,” says Grush. “The research has to be unbiased. It has to be published and reviewed. We needed someone outside the company.”

There are lots of potential applications of a driver style index — imagine a meter in your car that reported back to you. In addition to making your driving safer, you could give your insurance company permission to access the data, potentially resulting in lower rates.

The collaboration between Professor Donmez, Grush and U of T students Maryam Merrikhpour and Farzan Sasangohar was made possible by funding from FedDev’s Applied Research and Commercialization Initiative (ARC). FedDev was launched in August 2009 to help respond to Ontario’s economic challenges and the ARC is a pilot initiative aimed at addressing the gap between research and commercialization in southern Ontario and encouraging collaboration between small- and medium-sized businesses and post-secondary institutions.

“At the University of Toronto, we’re always looking for ways to make research meaningful to the wider community,” said Professor Peter Lewis, U of T’s Associate Vice-President (Research). “By working together with businesses, we’re accelerating the movement of ideas to the marketplace, for the benefit of all Ontarians. So we are delighted with the news of this generous investment. With this funding, our researchers, together with their private sector collaborators, are helping to create a prosperous, innovative future.”

Grush and Professor Donmez echoed Professor Lewis’s thanks. “It’s very important for Ontario companies like ours to get this kind of support, because we are job generators,” said Grush. “Canada does a lot of high-tech export so bringing universities and industry together creates wealth for everyone in the end.”

Professor Donmez noted that the funding will allow her to support several students working on the project. The U of T Engineering recipients are:

• Professor Tom Chau of the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering/Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital and Syngrafii Corporation for “Demographic Analysis of Handwriting BioAuthentication Characteristics.”
• Professor Birsen Donmez of the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering and Skymeter for “Identifying risky driving styles through a GPS-enabled telematics platform.”
• Professor Ridha Ben Mrad of the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering and Sensor Technology Ltd for “Piezoelectric for Energy Harvester for Self-powered Electronics.”
• Professor Joyce Poon of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Venkat Venkataramanan of the Institute for Optical Sciences and Mircom Ltd. for “Photo Electric Smoke Detectors.”
• Professor Harry Ruda of the Department of Materials Science & Engineering and Solar Grid Inc. for “High Efficiency Optimized Solar Cells (HELIOS).”
• Professor Pierre Sullivan of the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering and Engineering Services Inc. for “Mini Ion Mobility Spectrometer for Frontline Health Care.”