Maverick Engineering Social Media

Kevin Huang – Bubbling with Success

Discoveries in nanotechnology are expanding at a rapid pace, so much so that their eventual uses many not be fully appreciated or understood at the present. That’s probably the case for an innovation being developed by Materials Science and Engineering doctoral student Chien-Wen “Kevin” Huang.

Kevin has developed a new method of capturing extremely small bubbles of hydrogen gas in hollow, gold spheres less than 100 nanometers in diameter.

So what, you say? Well, gold and other noble metals are resistant to corrosion and oxidation and are biocompatible, so the body readily accepts their presence. This makes them excellent materials for transporting pharmaceuticals or radioactive agents to diseased parts of the body.

Kevin can make gold into very small hollow particles, which can absorb and scatter certain wavelengths of visible and infrared light. They can also efficiently convert the absorbed light into localized heat. In a biomedical application, ordinary or infrared light would pass harmlessly through the skin but be absorbed by the spheres to reveal the size and shape of a tumor and/or provide localized heat to destroy it.

Kevin’s discovery is the first time that a nano-size hydrogen bubble has been captured in spheres. In addition to biomedical applications, these may have potential uses for hydrogen storage and catalysts.

Dr. Yaowu Hao, Kevin’s doctoral supervisor, describes him as a highly-motivated, hard-working student. “He is just a second-year Ph.D. student, but in a short period of time he has become an independent researcher, from experimental design to analytical analysis,” said Dr. Hao. “The discovery he made potentially opens up a new research area where a variety of nanostructures can be made.”