Seminar – Prof. Tianhong Cui

By Prof. Tianhong Cui (Minnesota University)

*In person seminar *

Tuesday, November 5th 2024 – 2.30pm – McGill Macdonald Engineering Building (MD267)

Polymer shrinkage becomes a new approach to do lithography and generate smaller structures by reforming larger pre-patterned structures. The facile polymer fabrication approach by embossing and thermoplastic shrinkage aims to do lithography in a nanoscale or reduce the feature size and dramatically increase the aspect ratio of imprinted microstructures. The shrinkage capability of embossed microstructures is obtained by molding at low temperatures for less cycle time. Embossed patterns are activated for shrinkage by removing projected structures and heating at higher temperatures. The final structures are defined with the shape of removed materials before shrinking polymer materials. Both twoand three-dimensional embossed structures were successfully shrunk into much smaller scale. This polymer-shrinking process brings a new way to extend the fabrication capability of polymer embossing process towards MEMS-based biosensors. This talk will present shrink polymer for nanolithography, high-aspect-ratio microstructures, and biosensors for medical applications and water pollutants detection. By the end of the talk, the vision of sustainability of manufacturing in micro and nano scales will be covered.

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Yan Wang is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and leads the Multiscale Systems Engineering research group at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The research of the group is at the intersection of design, manufacturing, and materials. His interests include materials design, uncertainty quantification, physics-informed machine learning, and quantum scientific computing. He has co-authored over 240 refereed journal and conference publications, including the ones with best paper awards at the conferences of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS), the Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers (IISE), and the International CAD Conference. He is a recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Faculty Fellow, and an ASME Fellow. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering.