BINGHAMTON — Binghamton University and the University at Buffalo recently received a $517,969 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support research into a manufacturing technique for producing thin polymer films essential to the microelectronics, health care, and energy industries.

According to an online article in BingUNews on the college’s news website, researchers will integrate experiments, computational modeling, and artificial intelligence/machine learning methods to develop a framework for the process necessary to deposit the film via electrospray.

“Electrospray deposition is increasingly recognized as an effective, low-cost method for creating versatile polymeric films,” the NSF grant abstract noted. “However, a significant gap remains in understanding how the electrospray deposition process influences the characteristics of the resulting films, which has limited the widespread adoption of this technology in manufacturing.”

Through the research funded by the grant, the goal is to establish electrospray deposition as a viable manufacturing tool.

Binghamton University professor Paul R. Chiarot has worked on perfecting the process for more than a decade. One of the main things limiting the widespread use of electrospray is finding a way to make sure it is consistently applied to the desired specifications.

“The role of electric charge in the process is really important, and that is not something you can physically see,” he told BingUNews. “You kind of infer it based on how it interacts with its neighbors or how it interacts in its environment. With electrospray, the material it spits out has a high electric charge, and that charge accumulates on the surface as the material is depositing. Measuring the accumulation and decay of that charge is very difficult to do experimentally.”

Chiarot’s co-investigators are Associate Professor Daehan Won and Professor Sangwon Yoon from Watson College’s School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering along with Associate Professor Xin Yong and Assistant Professor Yu Jin of the University at Buffalo.

“If we have a better understanding about the underlying physics in electrospray deposition, can we also control the parameters?” Won said to BingUNews. “And what are the optimal parameters to get the desired level of quality we want? It’s a very complex problem, and it’s very hard to control.”

The grant-supported research will work to discover how charge transport influences the characteristics of an electrospray-deposited film and discover previously unobservable physics of the process with a goal of reducing processing costs and enabling the prediction of outcomes in manufacturing processes.

The project also aims, in collaboration with the Alliance for Manufacturing and Technology (AM&T), a nonprofit based in New York’s Southern Tier, to grow the manufacturing workforce through student training programs.

“While we are revitalizing the U.S. manufacturing industry, one of the keys is smart manufacturing, because it will help to reduce unnecessary labor and increase efficiency,” Won said. “With labor costs here compared to other countries like China or India, that is one way we could make it work.”