Energy and Environment 

Bio-Inspired MEMS Chemical Sensor for Heavy Metal Detection​​​​​

• Simple to use
• Easy to fabricate
• Low cost
• Highly portable and disposable
• Can be used for on-site/in-situ detection
• Can be miniaturized
• Can be integrated with other sensors

•  The sensor can be used to detect the tap water quality in individual households, restaurants, hotels, sports centres, shopping malls and school canteens.
• Can be incorporated into the purification system to monitor the heavy metal pollution levels of the purified water.
• Integrated into the portable water quality meter equipping with disposable sensor cartridge, which can be made of multiple microfluidic channels as well as an array of the developed MEMS chemical sensors.

• Water supply and distribution
• Water resource management

 

Figure 1: (a) Photograph of the bio-inspired MEMS chemical sensor after fabrication.

(b) A close-up of the 3D bio-inspired working electrode array under optical microscope, where ‘RE’, reference electrode; ‘WE’, working electrode; ‘CE’, counter electrode. 

(Reference: Nan WANG (NTU), Elgar KANHERE (NTU), Michael S. TRIANTAFYLLOU (MIT), Jianmin MIAO (NTU). 2015. Copper detection with bio-inspired MEMS-based electrochemical sensor. The 19th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences (MicroTAS 2015), Gyeongju, Korea, 25-29 October.)

Photoelectrochemical Catalyst for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Environment

• Highly efficient and cost-effective catalysts for photoelectrochemical reactions that generate renewable energy (such as hydrogen and hydrocarbons) or converting greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and methane). 
• Create new energies and to mitigate global warming by making use of renewable energies like solar or wind.
• Current hydrogen generation using proton-exchange-membrane (PEM) electrolyzers employed noble metals (e.g. platinum, iridium) or their compounds as the catalysts, which prevents the technology from scaling up due to low earth abundance of these noble metals.
• Our work focus on the engineering of non-precious metals (e.g., cobalt, molybdenum) and their compounds for catalysing hydrogen production. Hydrogen is important to overcome global warming challenge.
• On the other hand, conversion of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and methane is also crucial for mitigating global warming; but there is no commercial technology yet.
• The work strives to boost the efficiency of the catalysts and devices for these applications by careful engineering processes.

•  Cost-effective PEM electrolyzer for hydrogen generation
• CCost-effective converter for carbon dioxide or methane capture and utilization

Figure 1. Illustration of a catalyst being bombarded with argon atoms to create holes where chemical reactions can take place. The catalyst is molybdenum disulfide, or MoS2. The bombardment removed about one-tenth of the sulfur atoms (yellow) on its surface. Researchers then draped the holey catalyst over microscopic bumps to change the spacing of the atoms in a way that made the catalyst even more active.