(3el) Operando Study of Crystallization for Health Care and Energy Applications

My research is focused on design and development of micro-structure platforms for (i) a superior end to end continuous process of manufacturing crystalline materials and (ii) investigation and analysis of dendrite crystallization and growth in the energy storage and conversion systems.

Research Area1: Continuous Manufacturing of Pharmaceuticals with Microstructure platforms

Description: Manufacturing of pharmaceuticals requires for multiple batch operations, long operational hours and higher costs for supply chains. The rising costs has pressurized pharmaceutical industries to employ alternative approaches and increase their efficiencies to meet the growing demands. One of the most fundamental alternative approaches is continuous flow synthesis and formulation of active pharmaceutical ingredients because of its promising lower cost of production while being more reliable and safer. As a part of pharmacy on demand (PoD) development a compact end to end manufacturing system will significantly shorten the lead times. The emergence of the continuous manufacturing of pharmaceuticals started with small molecules, yet it is still challenging to extend the continuous approach for larger molecules such as monoclonal antibodies. Moreover, overcoming these challenges becomes more substantial for some of the cases such as vaccines, cell based or gene therapies. The significance of an efficient, robust and inexpensive process for manufacturing of vaccines has become more significant specially after the most recent global pandemic of COVID-19. It is an inevitable fact that after the antibody discovery and vaccine development, the extremely high demand for these products complexes their supply chain over the world. Therefore, shifting to PoD synthesis using microstructure platforms will mitigate the expenses for production and distribution and decrease the time span of the distribution of these products around the world, especially in the underdeveloped and developing areas.

The proposed research is on the development of compact and reconfigurable platform for:

• Increasing the productivity and efficiency of manufacturing of APIs;
• Reducing the cost of R&D and further APIs;
• Faster distribution of the essential drug products and shorter the supply chain distribution time span.

In the most recent studies, the continuous manufacturing of the APIs has been perused by designing compact modules for each section. These end-to-end manufacturing process use lab scale setups and are improved over the past few years with respect to the yield of productions as well as purity of the products. Hence, a micro-structure setup which has never been studied for the continuous manufacturing. The development plan of the continuous manufacturing process with microstructure platforms for a PoD system requires deep understanding of essential synthesis, filtration, and formulation steps as well as appropriate crystallization technique and operational condition. In order to obtain the optimal design for the continuous manufacturing process, Multiphysics simulations will be employed for the fabrication and assembly of the continuous manufacturing setup.

Research Area 2: Dendrite Growth and Crystallization in Energy Storage and Conversion Systems

Description: Solid state electrocatalysis are crucial to develop electrochemical energy storage and conversion systems to sustain our future energy needs that currently depend on depleting fossil fuels. In this energy transition, lithium (Li) metal is known as a promising candidate for rechargeable battery technologies owing to its high theoretical specific capacity. Nevertheless, its practical application is limited due to high reactivity of Li metal in contact with electrolyte as well as with air components such as humidity, carbon dioxide and etc. This will lead to formation of dendrites on the surface of the Li anode upon striping/plating over the cycling process that lowers the columbic efficiency, cycling performance and more importantly, causes short circuit by punctuating the porous separator. Therefore, an overarching challenge for this technology is to preserve the Li metal anode from possible parasitic reactions, making it a safe and higher performance, rechargeable battery system. To this end, extensive studies have been carried out on the electrolyte selection, electrolyte additives, electrochemical, chemical and physical artificial solid electrolyte interphase layers, super-concentrated electrolytes, solid electrolytes, membrane modification, as well as effect of operating parameters to stabilize the surface of Li anode by suppressing the dendrite growth. However, the so-called techniques either possess poor mechanical strength, high costs, low ionic conductivities, complication in fabrication process or almost no effect on the dendrite growth and nucleation, making this technology infeasible. Therefore, deeper scientific insights are required to precisely understand the Li plating/stripping behavior and avoid dendrite formation. My research proposal is focused on

• Development microstructure devices with ability to incorporate both closed and open battery architectures for real time analysis of dendritic growth and crystallization of Li metal;
• Monirtoring the dendrite crystallization can be as in-situ brightfield microscopy, confocal Raman microscopy, and X-ray diffraction;
• Screening different process parameters such as current density, the type of the electrolyte.

The information obtained by such analyses will be used to develop strategies, i.e. artificial solid electrolyte interphase layers, that can suppress the dendrite formation for higher performance and a safer battery technology.