May 22, 2012
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CHAMPAIGN, Ill – For Dr. Charles Marsh, the accolades keep rolling in to recognize his achievements as a materials scientist at ERDC Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL).
Most recently, he was named the Corps of Engineers’ Researcher of the Year. He also received the Society of American Military Engineers (SAME) Technology Advancement Medal Award, the Federal Laboratory Consortium’s (FLC) Excellence in Technology Transfer Award, and was a member of a team that won an ERDC Research and Development (R&D) Achievement Award.
The honors cite Marsh’s development and technology transfer of nanometer resolution wet sample imagery for transmission electron microscopes (TEMs), and the discovery of a new hierarchical and structural form of carbon.
The concept for the in situ TEMs sampling device grew out of Marsh’s collaboration with the University of Illinois Materials Research Laboratory and graduate student Ryan Franks. Marsh received two patents for the invention, which consists of a specialized window material assembled with multiple sealants to entirely contain a wet sample during imaging.
“Prior to this invention, real-time observation of material and biological interactions at a molecular scale within a native liquid or gaseous environment was both difficult and largely ineffective,” Marsh explained. “The method we developed can continuously image and record TEM samples in a wet environment at nanometer resolution.”
Marsh partnered with Hummingbird Scientific in Lacey, Wash., under the Small Business Innovation Research program, to produce a commercially available version of the device. Last summer, ERDC signed a patent license agreement with Hummingbird to effectively transfer the technology worldwide. The invention holds promise to serve critical research needs in the medical, pharmaceutical and nanobiotechnology fields, among many others.
Marsh’s second scientific breakthrough was the discovery of a new structural form of carbon, which is documented in the peer-reviewed journal Carbon. The Self-Assembled Tube Structure (SATS) is a 3-millimeter-long tube that itself, on a smaller scale, consists of carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Related research produced the capability to grow CNT “forests,” which is now routinely performed at CERL by catalytic chemical vapor deposition using an airborne ferrocene catalyst. An investigation of the effects of silicon substrate surface inhomogeneities on CNT forest growth also resulted in the formation of SATS.
Follow-on results demonstrate how more controlled preparation of the substrate surface at the multi-micron scale can lead to a variety of directed, reproducible and self-assembled CNT-based structures (i.e., SATS and variations). These hierarchical CNT structures are expected to have potential applications in areas such as energy technology, microelectronics, drug delivery and structural engineering.
The ERDC R&D Achievement Award recognized a team including researchers Dr. Charles Cornwell and Dr. Jabari Lee of ERDC’s Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) and Clint Arnett of CERL, in addition to Marsh. The group contributed to the science of carbon nanotube materials, adding significantly to the technology necessary to bring the super properties of carbon nanotubes to practical material systems for the Army. The team described a successful scalable molecular design for a carbon nanotube fiber that has a maximum tensile strength of some 8.6 million pounds per square inch, arguably the world’s strongest fiber.
The chief of engineers will present the Researcher of the Year Award to Marsh at the Summer Leadership Conference. He accepted the FLC award in Pittsburgh, May 3, and the Technology Transfer Medal will be presented at the SAME national training conference in May in St. Louis. Marsh’s achievements also were recognized with the Small Business Administration’s Tibbetts Award last year.