Daryl Yee

Love me some annealing twins

Over the past 6 months, we’ve been dabbling (very very lightly) into the world of lab automation.

Wise words from the engineer leading this project today.

There is one!

TIL that you can get hydrochloric acid like this. I have no idea why we bought this. It’s giving boxed wine / to-go vibes.

That's about the gist of it! We think this can be a general approach to making composites when transparency during printing is necessary. More to come :)

Huge thanks to @saraskrabalak.bsky.social for the invite to be part of the Emerging Investigators in Materials Science collection! (8/8)

Finally, we can use this approach to make multimaterial structures as well. By controlling where infusion and/or precipitation happens, you can spatially control the formation of the filler.

Here, we only grew the iron oxide on the top surface of the spring! (7/8)

But what's fun is that you can use this approach to grow all kinds of nanoparticles. You just need to adapt the infusion-precipitation conditions appropriately.

Here, we grew two kinds of fillers. We first grew iron oxide and then silver, which is why it appears silver but is magnetic (6/8)

Here's one example: we use the classic ammonia-induced coprecipitation of FeCl3 and FeCl2 to form iron oxide. By tuning the number of infusion-coprecipitation cycles, we can control the wt% of iron oxide, and by extension, the magnetic properties of the composite (5/8)

To grow the particles, we first infuse the polymer with the desired metal precursors, and then use a second reagent to initiate a precipitation reaction, forming the filler.

What's fun is that you can repeat this infusion-precipitation cycle to keep increasing the wt% of the filler! (4/8)

Considering how important composites are, we asked: How can we print composites with VAM technology?

Our solution: We just grow the fillers in the polymer post-printing! This allows us to use filler-free transparent resins for VAM and still obtain opaque composites in the end. (3/8)

A big challenge with VAM is that you need highly transparent resins. This means that it is really difficult to print composites since the fillers in the resin scatter light. Even more so if the fillers are non-index matched, strongly absorbing, or are in large quantities. (2/8)

Out now in ACS Materials Letters pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

We developed a method to fabricate composites with volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM). The study was led by Yiming Ji, a grad student in my group, with support from @xolo3d.bsky.social

Here's a little 🧵(1/8)

The first research paper of the group just got accepted! The review process always takes longer than expected but I'm glad it'll be out there soon :D

Ooh! Thanks for sharing. The English ones seem kinda dead. Doesn't bode well 😬 Oh well. Worth a thought

I see! Appreciate the insight

Gotcha! Interesting second point though. If the prior reviewer offered very critical comments without substance, why even let it through in the first round?

That makes a lot of sense!

Question for editors: in what situations do you send out a revised paper to additional reviewers? (Beyond the original set of reviewers)

I assume when one of the original reviewers don’t respond/decline to review? Or if it’s a split vote? Anything else?

The power of manuscript reviews How we craft reviews for early career researchers shapes our culture and community

A great article by @hormiga.bsky.social

scienceforeveryone.science/p/the-power-...

Gotta celebrate the small wins: a nice 3D printed “stent” we made recently :D

Wow! You’re going to nice places in Singapore :D

My group planned a mini chem-themed scavenger hunt. 10/10 for effort 🙏

I turned off notifications on all of mine and it’s been kinda nice tbh.

I spent way too long trying to figure how these work. Super cool how they look from different angles.

Apparently these are really common/popular 3D prints? I learn something new everyday.

I bet there is an academic paper on this somewhere.

Putting the east in Easter 🇸🇰

10 hours later and we are in Vienna. Almost there!

The connectivity and quality of European trains are truly amazing.

11 hr train journey today.

Took a little longer than expected but here’s the preprint: doi.org/10.26434/che...

What’s this? A spanner for ants?

What a research question to explore