Grant: Engage Grants Program

Smart Skin Inc. is a high tech company based in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Smart Skin has technology tocommercialize products that rely on piezoelectric material. They need conductive material with certainmechanical properties that could be useful for measuring the pressure on bottles in variety of bottlingindustries. Dr. Ghandi has expertise in Material Science, Physical, Green and Free Radical Chemistry. Freeradicals are molecules with one or more unpaired electron. Arguably, the most important industrial applicationof free radical chemistry is in the production of polymers, which are large molecules made of repeatingstructural units connected by chemical bonds. Some of the polymers made in Dr. Ghandi's lab are electronconductive. Dr. Ghandi and his group do their chemical synthesis at Mount Allison University laboratories andalso use facilities at the TRIUMF National Laboratory (in Vancouver, Canada), Rutherford AppletonLaboratory (RAL in the UK) and Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (JPARC) for characterization ofmaterial on an ongoing basis. In addition to Mount Allison University and other collaborating labs inMaritimes, all of these labs will be used for partial characterization of conducting polymers that will beprepared to generate mechanically robust conductive polymers with potential applications for piezoelectricdevices. The process that we will use in this project employs a type of polymerization under atmosphericpressure that relies on unstable free radical intermediates. The synthesis can be performed in temperatureranges from 25 to 100C (or higher if need be) for purposes of tuning the properties of the produced polymers orcomposite material. Our polymerization process does not use an open system, harmful to environment solventsthat have high vapour pressures, so it minimizes emissions to the atmosphere. The solvents for synthesis areionic liquids and water. (An ionic liquid is a salt in the liquid state with a very low vapour pressure and amelting point of usually less than 100C.).