Grant: Engage Grants Program

KnowCharge Inc. is a technology transfer company based in Fredericton, New Brunswick. KnowCharge has licensed patent pending technology to commercialize electronically conductive paper. The colour of their conductive papers is black. They need conductive papers with certain colours as well as papers that could be useful for electromagnetic shielding. Dr. Ghandi has expertise in Material Science, Physical, Green and Free Radical Chemistry. Free radicals are molecules with one or more unpaired electron. Arguably, the most important industrial application of free radical chemistry is in the production of polymers, which are large molecules made of repeating structural units connected by chemical bonds. Some of the polymers are electron conductive. Dr. Ghandi and his group do their chemical synthesis at Mount Allison University laboratories and also use facilities at the TRIUMF National Laboratory (in Vancouver, Canada), Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL in the UK) and Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (JPARC) for characterization of material on an ongoing basis. In addition to Mount Allison University, all of these labs will be used for partial characterization of magnetic and conducting polymers that will be prepared to generate coloured conductive papers and papers with potential applications for magnetic shielding. The process that we will use in this project employs a type of polymerization under atmospheric pressure that relies on unstable free radical intermediates, and uses inexpensive initiators. The synthesis can be performed in temperature ranges from 25 to 100C (or higher if need be) for purposes of tuning the properties of the produced polymers or composite material. Our polymerization process does not use in an open system, solvents that have high vapour pressures, so it minimizes emissions to the atmosphere. The solvents for synthesis are ionic liquids and water. (An ionic liquid is a salt in the liquid state with a very low vapour pressure and a melting point of usually less than 100C.).