Hayward

Chemical and Biological Engineering announces Professor Ryan Hayward as new chair

Anonymous — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 20:12:26 +0000

Chemical and Biological Engineering announces Professor Ryan Hayward as new chair Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/25/2024 - 14:12 Susan Glairon

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Professor Ryan Hayward with his dogs, Violet (left) and Maggie, at Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada.

Professor Ryan Hayward has witnessed the continued advancement of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering since he joined CU Boulder four years ago. Now he’s looking forward to stepping into his new role as department chair.

Hayward, who holds the James and Catherine Patten Endowed Professorship of Chemical and Biological Engineering, was elected chair by the department’s faculty. His term begins on July 1.

“Our department is among the top chemical and biological engineering departments in the country,” Hayward said. “Our faculty has never been more vibrant in research and in contributions to the department’s culture. Over the past several years, we’ve hired fantastic junior faculty and made a number of excellent senior-level hires. In addition, our graduate students are more qualified and more diverse than ever before.

“It thrills me to be part of this,” he added.

Hayward replaces Professor Will Medlin, who led the department as chair for four years. Medlin is credited with deftly piloting the department through the challenges of COVID and overseeing a period of strong growth in faculty, funded research and the graduate program.

As chair, Hayward plans to hire several faculty in key areas, including sustainability, biological engineering, computational engineering and materials.

He also aims to increase undergraduate enrollment and improve communication with undergraduate students about the value and versatility of the department’s biological engineering and chemical engineering degrees, which not only prepare students for careers in traditional fields, like petrochemicals and oil and gas, but also in materials science, microelectronics, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, renewable energy, sustainability and medicine, among others.

Leadership path

Over the past three years, Hayward received two major departmental awards, including the department’s Overall Achievement Award (2023) and the Engineering Service Award (2021).

“It’s truly flattering to be recognized in this way, especially considering the many faculty in the department who excel in research, teaching and service,” Hayward said of his receiving the Overall Achievement Award. “This year was particularly balanced for me, with several positive developments for my research team, including the publication of a few high-impact papers. While my graduate students and postdocs deserve most of the credit for these achievements, I am honored to receive this award on their behalf.”

Hayward added that he has taught the polymer engineering class for the past several years. Each year, he tries to make improvements to the course.

“This year, those changes resonated well with the class, contributing to a great semester,” he said.

Hayward’s service award was based on his role as a faculty associate chair, where he oversaw faculty promotion, tenure, hiring and mentoring as well as social and scientific events, fostering community and scientific engagement between faculty. Externally, he is also a member of the leadership team in the Division of Polymer Physics for the American Physical Society.

Hayward’s research focuses on responsive materials, which change their properties when a parameter is adjusted. Light-responsive materials use light to control and power materials wirelessly, with potential applications in robotics, autonomous vehicles and small submersible aircraft. Electrically responsive materials have potential uses in virtual reality devices, such as simulating a touch sensation by controlling the stiffness of a glove, and in medical devices with an exoskeleton that stiffens or softens as a person moves. They also have applications in industrial processing for handling objects or substrates.

“I am truly honored that my colleagues have asked me to take on this role," Hayward said. "I look forward to contributing to the continued development of a collaborative, innovative and inclusive culture in the department."

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CU Boulder researchers develop arrays of tiny crystals that deliver efficient wireless energy

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 17:45:05 +0000

CU Boulder researchers develop arrays of tiny crystals that deliver efficient wireless energy Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/07/2023 - 11:45

Susan Glairon

Imagine a person on the ground guiding an airborne drone that harnesses its energy from a laser beam, eliminating the need for carrying a bulky onboard battery.

That is the vision of a group of CU Boulder scientists from the Hayward Research Group. In a new study, the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering researchers have developed a novel and resilient photomechanical material that can transform light energy into mechanical work without heat or electricity, offering innovative possibilities for energy-efficient, wireless and remotely controlled systems. Its wide-ranging potential spans across diverse industries, including robotics, aerospace and biomedical devices.

“We cut out the middle man, so to speak, and take light energy and turn it directly into mechanical deformation,” Professor Ryan Hayward said.

Hayward and his team describe the new material in a report published July 27 in Nature Materials.

The material is composed of tiny organic crystals that start bending and lifting things when exposed to light. The research shows that these photomechanical materials offer a promising alternative to electrically-wired actuators, with the potential to wirelessly control or power robots or vehicles. Also, improving the efficiency of direct conversion of light to work offers the potential to avoid cumbersome systems for thermal management as well as heavy electrical components.

The research contrasts with previous attempts involving delicate crystalline solids that changed shape through a photochemical reaction, but often cracked when exposed to light and were challenging to process into useful actuators.

“What's exciting is that these new actuators are much better than the ones we had before. They respond quickly, last a long time and can lift heavy things.”

The Hayward’s Lab innovative approach involves using arrays of tiny organic crystals within a polymer material that resembles a sponge due to its tiny holes. As the crystals grow within the micron-sized pores of the polymer, their durability and energy production upon light exposure are significantly enhanced. Their flexibility and ease of shaping make them highly versatile for a wide range of applications.

The crystals’ orientation allows them to perform tasks when exposed to light, such as bending or lifting objects. When the material changes shape with a load attached, it operates like a motor or an actuator and moves the load. The crystals can move objects much larger than themselves. For example, as seen in the image above, the .02 mg strip of crystals successfully lifts a 20 mg nylon ball, lifting 10,000 times its own mass.

CU Boulder researchers also include lead author Wenwen Xu, a former postdoctoral researcher in Hayward’s group, (now with the Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute) and Hantao Zhou (now with Western Digital), one of Hayward’s graduate students.The work also involved collaborators at the University of California Riverside and Stanford University and was funded by the Office of Naval Research.

Looking ahead, the team aims to advance control over the material’s movement. Currently the material can only go from a flat to a curved state by bending and then unbending. Their objective is also to increase efficiency, maximizing the amount of mechanical energy produced out in comparison to the light energy input.

“We still have a ways to go, particularly in terms of efficiency, before these materials can really compete with existing actuators,” Hayward says. “But this study is an important step in the right direction and gives us a roadmap for how we might be able to get there in the coming years.”

In a new study published in Nature Materials, the Hayward Research Group unveiled a resilient photomechanical material that can convert light energy into mechanical work without heat or electricity. Its potential applications include powering a drone with a laser beam, bypassing the need for a bulky on-board battery.

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Michael Toney and Ryan Hayward receive $699,000 award from the Office of Naval Research/DoD

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:31:06 +0000

Michael Toney and Ryan Hayward receive $699,000 award from the Office of Naval Research/DoD Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/20/2022 - 16:31

Ryan Hayward

Michael Toney

Professors Michael Toney and Ryan Hayward of chemical and biological engineering and the Materials Science Engineering Program received a one-year Office of Naval Research/DoD award for $699,000 for “Small- and Wide-angle X-ray Scattering to Probe Functional Organic Materials.”

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Faculty collaboration earns $2M NSF award for post-consumer plastic waste research

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 16:09:19 +0000

Faculty collaboration earns $2M NSF award for post-consumer plastic waste research Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/25/2021 - 10:09

Jonathan Raab

Single use plastics represent an environmental challenge that researchers at the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering hope to address.

The proliferation of plastic products has created an environmental challenge: what should be done with unusable, discarded plastic waste that can harm the environment? Faculty from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering are working on a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project, Hydrogenolysis for Upcycling of Polyesters and Mixed Plastics, to address this serious environmental issue.

Denver Business Challenge Endowed Professor Will Medlin, James and Catherine Patten Endowed Professor Ryan Hayward, Assistant Professor Kayla Sprenger, Professor Michael Toney and their respective groups are collaborating on this project, which the NSF is funding through a $2 million grant.

“Figuring out how to deal with post-consumer plastic waste is a major societal problem,” Medlin said. “We were all independently interested in working on this problem, but were approaching it from different angles. Ryan is an expert on how plastics are formed and could be degraded, Mike is an expert on developing experimental tools to understand the interfaces between materials that arise in chemical upcycling of plastics, Kayla is an expert on computational modeling studies of similar interfaces and my group works on catalysts for depolymerization.”

Given the complexity of the problem, the researchers decided to combine their diverse yet complementary approaches to address problems in chemical upcycling. The Medlin group has been working on the conversion of biomass-derived polymers to renewable products for the last several years.

“Although plant-made polymers are certainly different from man-made plastics, some of the essential catalyst processes are quite similar,” Medlin said. “You’re trying to break apart a macromolecule into specific units that can be made into useful products. Extending our work to plastics upcycling made sense based on the group's general focus, and students are highly motivated to work on this critical environmental problem.”

The Hayward group will work on characterizing how the polymers in question are catalytically deconstructed — specifically how the polymers interact with the catalyst support surfaces and how the polymer chain lengths evolve as the reactions proceed.

“Enabling a shift to a more sustainable use of polymers, where the vast majority are recycled or converted to higher value products rather than being discarded after a single use is one of the most important challenges facing materials scientists today,” Hayward said. “We were very excited about the opportunity to join this team and to be able to work towards a very promising route toward deconstructing polymers into high value products.”

Toney said that his group will contribute research that focuses on the interfacial interactions between the catalyst, support and polymers as they react. This will require the development of new 'operando' experimental tools to observe the reactions in real-time.

“My research is largely motivated by helping to solve the sustainability challenges facing humanity by helping to develop new materials and processes,” Toney said. “Eliminating plastic waste is one such challenge perhaps most popularly seen by reports of ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.’ This is my first research effort aimed at helping the team develop more effective methods to eliminate plastic waste.”

Medlin also credited Adjoint Professor Gregg Beckham as being a key part of the team. Beckham, who also works at NREL, will be contributing his expertise in plastics upcycling and conducting technoeconomic analyses of the processes the collaboration develops. Professor Andreas Heyden from the University of South Carolina will also conduct quantum mechanical simulations to understand the atomic-scale interactions between plastics and active catalysts, which will complement the Sprenger group’s efforts.

This grant was funded through the NSF Directorate for Engineering’s Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation program.

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