At Weber State University, Ranga Don Wahalathantrige and his students are exploring a less hazardous way to make semiconducting plastics for use in electronics.
Semiconducting plastics are manmade polymers — large molecules made out of many repeating units — that allow electrical charges to move through them. Electrical conductivity is usually a property reserved for metals, like silicon, but metals are also bulky and they can break if you bend them.
Semiconducting plastics, on the other hand, are flexible and thin. They’re so thin, in fact, that you can use them like paint.
“Yes, you can spray paint them. You can use roll to roll printing,” Wahalathantrige said.
Potentially, such plastics can be used in extremely lightweight wearable technology, or even next generation solar cells.
But there are issues with semiconducting plastics. One major hurdle is simply the process of making them in the first place.
“The problem is this chemical reaction will produce a lot of hazardous byproducts,” Wahalathantrige said.
He and his students are working to change that.
“So, I came up with this idea where we can replace this toxic reaction with something much more environmentally friendly,” he said.
Granted, that takes time. Replacing a reaction often means changing the ingredients. Then, getting that new reaction to work takes experimentation, and Wahalathantrige’s undergraduate students are helping to work out the chemistry.
“Now the students are, like, putting A and B together, trying the reaction," Wahalathantrige said. "If it doesn't work, we change the reaction again, put in a different molecule, so there's a lot of optimization happening right now."
Wahalathantrige says that the technology is still developing; it’s early in its initial stages. Building new polymers from raw molecular ingredients can take weeks. The materials need further development and testing before they can be used in wearable electronics or solar cells.
For now, he and his students are tackling the chemistry that could help make those future applications possible.
For more information check out the article by Weber State University or read the paper that started the research.
