Francisco J . Martin-Martinez | Swansea University (original) (raw)
Papers by Francisco J . Martin-Martinez
Handbook of Materials Modeling
Frontiers in Chemistry, Oct 13, 2022
Editorial on the Research Topic Biobased Nanomaterials: New Trends and Applications The conjuncti... more Editorial on the Research Topic Biobased Nanomaterials: New Trends and Applications The conjunction of world's limited natural resources and the ever-growing material needs of our increasing global population is environmentally and economically unsustainable. Subsequently, the impact of climate change, the depletion of fossil fuels, increasing social pressures, and the implementation of new policies across the globe, are slowly driving our society towards a biobased economy that unlocks the full potential of all types of sustainably sourced biomass, crop residues, industrial side-streams and wastes to produce value-added products (Lange et al., 2021). The complexity of this transition to a new economic model is substantial, and it challenges scientists, policy makers, and industry platforms. Nevertheless, our society is starting to rethink material and energy sources, supply chains, and product design across industries. Therefore, as this biobased economy develops and a new alternative model emerges, it is paramount to advance in sustainable material, and energy production, identifying new applications, and determining possible impacts of this technological development (Weiss et al., 2012). In fact, a plethora of applications that valorize biomass (Hu et al., 2010), and implement biomass-derived (i.e., biobased) materials, are being intensively investigated. These biobased materials are specially focused on energy storage (Titirici et al., 2012), platform chemicals, biomedicine (Abdelhamid and Mathew, 2022), and char production for soil remediation (Correa and Kruse, 2018), but also include biofuels, nanomaterials, carbon fibers, adhesives, foams, and coatings, just to mention a few. Within this context, this research topic provides some new trends and applications of emerging biobased nanomaterials, including biobased carbon fibers, wood-based materials, and mycelium. As shown in Figure 1, the number of publications that include "biobased" with materials like mycelium (Grimm and Wösten, 2018),
Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering
Frontiers in Chemistry
Climate change, socioeconomical pressures, and new policy and legislation are driving a decarboni... more Climate change, socioeconomical pressures, and new policy and legislation are driving a decarbonization process across industries, with a critical shift from a fossil-based economy toward a biomass-based one. This new paradigm implies not only a gradual phasing out of fossil fuels as a source of energy but also a move away from crude oil as a source of platform chemicals, polymers, drugs, solvents and many other critical materials, and consumer goods that are ubiquitous in our everyday life. If we are to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, crude oil must be substituted by renewable sources, and in this evolution, biorefineries arise as the critical alternative to traditional refineries for producing fuels, chemical building blocks, and materials out of non-edible biomass and biomass waste. State-of-the-art biorefineries already produce cost-competitive chemicals and materials, but other products remain challenging from the economic point of view, or their scal...
Lignin and Lignans as Renewable Raw Materials
This year 15 interns join us for a 10 week programme between 28th June and 25th September 2021. T... more This year 15 interns join us for a 10 week programme between 28th June and 25th September 2021. The projects they are working on are interdisciplinary and include both cutting-edge AI and cutting-edge chemical discovery and demonstrate how and why they are relevant to AI3SD. The projects must be able to demonstrate valuable outputs both with respect to developing student skill and providing impact to AI3SD.<br><br>The Interns will be required to produce a poster for the AI3SD Summer Project Symposia 1st and 2nd September 2021, and they will take part in our Skills4Scientists programme that will run weekly across July and August whereby the interns will be given training in a range of research, technical and interpersonal skills, alongside informative career-based events.
Advanced Materials
Advancing a socially-directed approach to materials research and development is an imperative to ... more Advancing a socially-directed approach to materials research and development is an imperative to address contemporary challenges and mitigate future detrimental environmental and social impacts. This paper reviews, synergizes, and identifies cross-disciplinary opportunities at the intersection of materials science and engineering with humanistic social sciences fields. Such integrated knowledge and methodologies foster a contextual understanding of materials technologies embedded within, and impacting broader societal systems, thus informing decision making upstream and throughout the entire research and development process toward more socially responsible outcomes. Technological advances in the development of structural color, which arises due to the incoherent and coherent scattering of micro-and nanoscale features and possesses a vast design space, are considered in this context. Specific areas of discussion include material culture, narratives, and visual perception, material waste and use, environmental and social life cycle assessment, and stakeholder and community engagement. A case study of the technical and social implications of bio-based cellulose (as a source for structurally colored products) is provided. Socially-directed research and development of materials for structural color hold significant capacity for improved planetary and societal impact across industries such as aerospace, consumer products, displays and sensors, paints and dyes, and food and agriculture.
ACS Sensors, 2022
Overexposure to complete solar radiation (combined ultraviolet, visible, and infrared) is correla... more Overexposure to complete solar radiation (combined ultraviolet, visible, and infrared) is correlated with several harmful biological consequences including hyperpigmentation, skin cancer, eye damage, and immune suppression. With limited effective therapeutic options available for these conditions, significant efforts have been directed toward promoting preventative habits. Recently, wearable solar radiometers have emerged as practical tools for managing personal exposure to sunlight. However, designing simple and inexpensive sensors that can measure energy across multiple spectral regions without incorporating electronic components remains challenging, largely due to inherent spectral limitations of photoresponsive indicators. In this work, we report the design, fabrication, and characterization of wearable radiation sensors that leverage an unexpected feature of a natural biochrome, xanthommatin-its innate sensitivity to both ultraviolet and visible through near-infrared radiation. We found that xanthommatin-based sensors undergo a visible shift from yellow to red in the presence of complete sunlight. This color change is driven by intrinsic photoreduction of the molecule, which we investigated using computational modeling and supplemented by radiation-driven formation of complementary reducing agents. These sensors are responsive to dermatologically relevant doses of erythemally weighted radiation, as well as cumulative doses of high-energy ultraviolet radiation used for germicidal sterilization. We incorporated these miniature sensors into pressure-activated microfluidic systems to illustrate on-demand activation of a wearable and mountable form factor. When taken together, our findings encompass an important advancement toward accessible, quantitative measurements of UVC and complete solar radiation for a variety of use cases.
Lignin and Lignans as Renewable Raw Materials, 2015
Computational Materials, Chemistry, and Biochemistry: From Bold Initiatives to the Last Mile, 2021
Bone, nacre, and other biological materials exhibit unique hierarchical structures at different l... more Bone, nacre, and other biological materials exhibit unique hierarchical structures at different length scales, and thereby achieve versatile material functions. The excellent performance of bioinspired designs in materials science has attracted the interest of engineers and scientists to expand this bioinspiration to many other materials, including graphene. Among the different designs that draw significant attention, butterfly wings are particularly noteworthy, whose iridescent colors arise from the interaction of light with highly precise multiscale structures that in some cases correspond to a 3D shape of gyroid geometries. Especially, the combination of gyroid designs with graphene can produce mechanical and thermal functions for carbon porous materials that exhibit superior properties such as strength 10 times higher than mild steel, with only around 4.6% the density of this material, featuring also density-insensitive thermal stability, as well as an outstanding impact energy absorption capability as high as 269 MJ/m 3. Based on molecular modeling, the physics and mechanics of graphene-based gyroid structures, as well as their performance in the context of thermal conduction and impact energy absorption are included in our current short review. 27.1 Introduction During billions of years, nature has developed sophisticated multifunctional materials such as bone, silk, nacre, abalone, and butterflies' wings with an optimal combination of different thermal, optical, mechanical, acoustic, electromagnetic, Chapter, for the special Springer Materials Science volume in honor of William A. Goddard III.
Lignin and Lignans as Renewable Raw Materials, 2015
Lignin and Lignans as Renewable Raw Materials, 2015
Lignin and Lignans as Renewable Raw Materials, 2015
Advanced Functional Materials, 2020
Large area graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) has been the main focus of many rese... more Large area graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) has been the main focus of many researchers due to its vast areas of applications such as sensing or photovoltaics. Addressing the main challenges in transfer techniques such as Roll-to-Roll (R2R) process is a critical step for scaling up and commercialization of graphene. In this work, we employ a R2R transfer technique and improve the electrical properties of transferred graphene on flexible substrates using parylene as an interfacial layer. We deposit a layer of parylene on graphene/copper (Cu) foils grown by CVD and laminate them onto EVA/PET. Then, the samples are delaminated from the Cu using an electrochemical transfer process, resulting in flexible and conductive substrates with sheet resistance of below 300 Ω/sq, which is significantly better (4-fold) than the sample transferred by R2R without parylene (1200 Ω/sq). By scanning over different types of parylene (N, C, and D) here, we find that parylene C and D are better candidates than parylene N, given the higher conductivity measured on the as-transferred graphene samples. Our characterization results indicate that parylene C and D dope graphene due to the presence of chlorine atoms in their structure, resulting in higher carrier density and thus lower sheet resistance. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the binding energy between parylene and graphene is stronger than that of EVA and graphene, which may lead to less tear in graphene during the R2R transfer. Finally, we fabricate organic solar cells (OSCs) on the ultrathin and flexible parylene/graphene substrates and achieve an ultra-lightweight device with a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 5.86% comparable with PET/ITO ones, which has also a high power-per-weight of 6.46 W/g. In this study, we employ PV2000/PC 60 BM blend for the device fabrication, which does not require any encapsulation due to its superior air-stability.
ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, 2020
DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of t... more DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:
Advanced Materials, 2019
By varying the number of acetylenic linkages connecting aromatic rings, a new family of atomicall... more By varying the number of acetylenic linkages connecting aromatic rings, a new family of atomically thin graph-n-yne materials can be designed and synthesized. Generating immense scientific interest due to its structural diversity and excellent physical properties, graph-n-yne opened new avenues towards numerous promising engineering applications, especially for separation membranes with precise pore sizes. Having these tunable pore sizes in combination with their excellent mechanical strength to withstand high pressures, free-standing graph-n-yne is theoretically posited to be an outstanding membrane material for separating or purifying mixtures of either gas or liquid, rivaling or even dramatically exceeding the capabilities of current, state-ofart separation membranes. Computational modeling and simulations play an integral role in the bottom-up design and characterization of these graph-n-yne materials. Thus, the present review discusses the state of the art in modeling α-, β-, γ-, δ-, and 6,6,12-graphyne nanosheets for synthesizing graph-2-yne materials and 3D architectures thereof. We describe different synthesis methods and provide a broad overview of computational characterizations of graph-n-yne's electrical, chemical, and thermal properties. We further review a series of in-depth computational studies that delved into the specifics of graph-n-yne's mechanical strength and porosity that confer superior performance for separation and desalination membranes.
Advanced Materials, 2019
There is great interest in developing conductive biomaterials for the manufacturing of sensors or... more There is great interest in developing conductive biomaterials for the manufacturing of sensors or flexible electronics with applications in health-care, tracking human motion, or in-situ strain measurements. These biomaterials aim to overcome the mismatch in mechanical properties at the interface between typical rigid semiconductor sensors and soft, often uneven biological surfaces or tissues for in vivo and ex vivo applications. In this paper we demonstrate the use of biobased carbons to fabricate conductive, highly stretchable, flexible and biocompatible silk-based composite biomaterials. Biobased carbons are synthesized via hydrothermal processing, an aqueous thermochemical method that converts biomass into a carbonaceous material that can be applied upon activation as conductive filler in composite biomaterials. We combine experimental synthesis and full-atomistic molecular dynamics modeling to synthesize and characterize these conductive composite biomaterials, made entirely from renewable sources and with promising applications in fields like biomedicine, energy, and electronics.
Handbook of Materials Modeling
Frontiers in Chemistry, Oct 13, 2022
Editorial on the Research Topic Biobased Nanomaterials: New Trends and Applications The conjuncti... more Editorial on the Research Topic Biobased Nanomaterials: New Trends and Applications The conjunction of world's limited natural resources and the ever-growing material needs of our increasing global population is environmentally and economically unsustainable. Subsequently, the impact of climate change, the depletion of fossil fuels, increasing social pressures, and the implementation of new policies across the globe, are slowly driving our society towards a biobased economy that unlocks the full potential of all types of sustainably sourced biomass, crop residues, industrial side-streams and wastes to produce value-added products (Lange et al., 2021). The complexity of this transition to a new economic model is substantial, and it challenges scientists, policy makers, and industry platforms. Nevertheless, our society is starting to rethink material and energy sources, supply chains, and product design across industries. Therefore, as this biobased economy develops and a new alternative model emerges, it is paramount to advance in sustainable material, and energy production, identifying new applications, and determining possible impacts of this technological development (Weiss et al., 2012). In fact, a plethora of applications that valorize biomass (Hu et al., 2010), and implement biomass-derived (i.e., biobased) materials, are being intensively investigated. These biobased materials are specially focused on energy storage (Titirici et al., 2012), platform chemicals, biomedicine (Abdelhamid and Mathew, 2022), and char production for soil remediation (Correa and Kruse, 2018), but also include biofuels, nanomaterials, carbon fibers, adhesives, foams, and coatings, just to mention a few. Within this context, this research topic provides some new trends and applications of emerging biobased nanomaterials, including biobased carbon fibers, wood-based materials, and mycelium. As shown in Figure 1, the number of publications that include "biobased" with materials like mycelium (Grimm and Wösten, 2018),
Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering
Frontiers in Chemistry
Climate change, socioeconomical pressures, and new policy and legislation are driving a decarboni... more Climate change, socioeconomical pressures, and new policy and legislation are driving a decarbonization process across industries, with a critical shift from a fossil-based economy toward a biomass-based one. This new paradigm implies not only a gradual phasing out of fossil fuels as a source of energy but also a move away from crude oil as a source of platform chemicals, polymers, drugs, solvents and many other critical materials, and consumer goods that are ubiquitous in our everyday life. If we are to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, crude oil must be substituted by renewable sources, and in this evolution, biorefineries arise as the critical alternative to traditional refineries for producing fuels, chemical building blocks, and materials out of non-edible biomass and biomass waste. State-of-the-art biorefineries already produce cost-competitive chemicals and materials, but other products remain challenging from the economic point of view, or their scal...
Lignin and Lignans as Renewable Raw Materials
This year 15 interns join us for a 10 week programme between 28th June and 25th September 2021. T... more This year 15 interns join us for a 10 week programme between 28th June and 25th September 2021. The projects they are working on are interdisciplinary and include both cutting-edge AI and cutting-edge chemical discovery and demonstrate how and why they are relevant to AI3SD. The projects must be able to demonstrate valuable outputs both with respect to developing student skill and providing impact to AI3SD.<br><br>The Interns will be required to produce a poster for the AI3SD Summer Project Symposia 1st and 2nd September 2021, and they will take part in our Skills4Scientists programme that will run weekly across July and August whereby the interns will be given training in a range of research, technical and interpersonal skills, alongside informative career-based events.
Advanced Materials
Advancing a socially-directed approach to materials research and development is an imperative to ... more Advancing a socially-directed approach to materials research and development is an imperative to address contemporary challenges and mitigate future detrimental environmental and social impacts. This paper reviews, synergizes, and identifies cross-disciplinary opportunities at the intersection of materials science and engineering with humanistic social sciences fields. Such integrated knowledge and methodologies foster a contextual understanding of materials technologies embedded within, and impacting broader societal systems, thus informing decision making upstream and throughout the entire research and development process toward more socially responsible outcomes. Technological advances in the development of structural color, which arises due to the incoherent and coherent scattering of micro-and nanoscale features and possesses a vast design space, are considered in this context. Specific areas of discussion include material culture, narratives, and visual perception, material waste and use, environmental and social life cycle assessment, and stakeholder and community engagement. A case study of the technical and social implications of bio-based cellulose (as a source for structurally colored products) is provided. Socially-directed research and development of materials for structural color hold significant capacity for improved planetary and societal impact across industries such as aerospace, consumer products, displays and sensors, paints and dyes, and food and agriculture.
ACS Sensors, 2022
Overexposure to complete solar radiation (combined ultraviolet, visible, and infrared) is correla... more Overexposure to complete solar radiation (combined ultraviolet, visible, and infrared) is correlated with several harmful biological consequences including hyperpigmentation, skin cancer, eye damage, and immune suppression. With limited effective therapeutic options available for these conditions, significant efforts have been directed toward promoting preventative habits. Recently, wearable solar radiometers have emerged as practical tools for managing personal exposure to sunlight. However, designing simple and inexpensive sensors that can measure energy across multiple spectral regions without incorporating electronic components remains challenging, largely due to inherent spectral limitations of photoresponsive indicators. In this work, we report the design, fabrication, and characterization of wearable radiation sensors that leverage an unexpected feature of a natural biochrome, xanthommatin-its innate sensitivity to both ultraviolet and visible through near-infrared radiation. We found that xanthommatin-based sensors undergo a visible shift from yellow to red in the presence of complete sunlight. This color change is driven by intrinsic photoreduction of the molecule, which we investigated using computational modeling and supplemented by radiation-driven formation of complementary reducing agents. These sensors are responsive to dermatologically relevant doses of erythemally weighted radiation, as well as cumulative doses of high-energy ultraviolet radiation used for germicidal sterilization. We incorporated these miniature sensors into pressure-activated microfluidic systems to illustrate on-demand activation of a wearable and mountable form factor. When taken together, our findings encompass an important advancement toward accessible, quantitative measurements of UVC and complete solar radiation for a variety of use cases.
Lignin and Lignans as Renewable Raw Materials, 2015
Computational Materials, Chemistry, and Biochemistry: From Bold Initiatives to the Last Mile, 2021
Bone, nacre, and other biological materials exhibit unique hierarchical structures at different l... more Bone, nacre, and other biological materials exhibit unique hierarchical structures at different length scales, and thereby achieve versatile material functions. The excellent performance of bioinspired designs in materials science has attracted the interest of engineers and scientists to expand this bioinspiration to many other materials, including graphene. Among the different designs that draw significant attention, butterfly wings are particularly noteworthy, whose iridescent colors arise from the interaction of light with highly precise multiscale structures that in some cases correspond to a 3D shape of gyroid geometries. Especially, the combination of gyroid designs with graphene can produce mechanical and thermal functions for carbon porous materials that exhibit superior properties such as strength 10 times higher than mild steel, with only around 4.6% the density of this material, featuring also density-insensitive thermal stability, as well as an outstanding impact energy absorption capability as high as 269 MJ/m 3. Based on molecular modeling, the physics and mechanics of graphene-based gyroid structures, as well as their performance in the context of thermal conduction and impact energy absorption are included in our current short review. 27.1 Introduction During billions of years, nature has developed sophisticated multifunctional materials such as bone, silk, nacre, abalone, and butterflies' wings with an optimal combination of different thermal, optical, mechanical, acoustic, electromagnetic, Chapter, for the special Springer Materials Science volume in honor of William A. Goddard III.
Lignin and Lignans as Renewable Raw Materials, 2015
Lignin and Lignans as Renewable Raw Materials, 2015
Lignin and Lignans as Renewable Raw Materials, 2015
Advanced Functional Materials, 2020
Large area graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) has been the main focus of many rese... more Large area graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) has been the main focus of many researchers due to its vast areas of applications such as sensing or photovoltaics. Addressing the main challenges in transfer techniques such as Roll-to-Roll (R2R) process is a critical step for scaling up and commercialization of graphene. In this work, we employ a R2R transfer technique and improve the electrical properties of transferred graphene on flexible substrates using parylene as an interfacial layer. We deposit a layer of parylene on graphene/copper (Cu) foils grown by CVD and laminate them onto EVA/PET. Then, the samples are delaminated from the Cu using an electrochemical transfer process, resulting in flexible and conductive substrates with sheet resistance of below 300 Ω/sq, which is significantly better (4-fold) than the sample transferred by R2R without parylene (1200 Ω/sq). By scanning over different types of parylene (N, C, and D) here, we find that parylene C and D are better candidates than parylene N, given the higher conductivity measured on the as-transferred graphene samples. Our characterization results indicate that parylene C and D dope graphene due to the presence of chlorine atoms in their structure, resulting in higher carrier density and thus lower sheet resistance. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the binding energy between parylene and graphene is stronger than that of EVA and graphene, which may lead to less tear in graphene during the R2R transfer. Finally, we fabricate organic solar cells (OSCs) on the ultrathin and flexible parylene/graphene substrates and achieve an ultra-lightweight device with a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 5.86% comparable with PET/ITO ones, which has also a high power-per-weight of 6.46 W/g. In this study, we employ PV2000/PC 60 BM blend for the device fabrication, which does not require any encapsulation due to its superior air-stability.
ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, 2020
DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of t... more DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:
Advanced Materials, 2019
By varying the number of acetylenic linkages connecting aromatic rings, a new family of atomicall... more By varying the number of acetylenic linkages connecting aromatic rings, a new family of atomically thin graph-n-yne materials can be designed and synthesized. Generating immense scientific interest due to its structural diversity and excellent physical properties, graph-n-yne opened new avenues towards numerous promising engineering applications, especially for separation membranes with precise pore sizes. Having these tunable pore sizes in combination with their excellent mechanical strength to withstand high pressures, free-standing graph-n-yne is theoretically posited to be an outstanding membrane material for separating or purifying mixtures of either gas or liquid, rivaling or even dramatically exceeding the capabilities of current, state-ofart separation membranes. Computational modeling and simulations play an integral role in the bottom-up design and characterization of these graph-n-yne materials. Thus, the present review discusses the state of the art in modeling α-, β-, γ-, δ-, and 6,6,12-graphyne nanosheets for synthesizing graph-2-yne materials and 3D architectures thereof. We describe different synthesis methods and provide a broad overview of computational characterizations of graph-n-yne's electrical, chemical, and thermal properties. We further review a series of in-depth computational studies that delved into the specifics of graph-n-yne's mechanical strength and porosity that confer superior performance for separation and desalination membranes.
Advanced Materials, 2019
There is great interest in developing conductive biomaterials for the manufacturing of sensors or... more There is great interest in developing conductive biomaterials for the manufacturing of sensors or flexible electronics with applications in health-care, tracking human motion, or in-situ strain measurements. These biomaterials aim to overcome the mismatch in mechanical properties at the interface between typical rigid semiconductor sensors and soft, often uneven biological surfaces or tissues for in vivo and ex vivo applications. In this paper we demonstrate the use of biobased carbons to fabricate conductive, highly stretchable, flexible and biocompatible silk-based composite biomaterials. Biobased carbons are synthesized via hydrothermal processing, an aqueous thermochemical method that converts biomass into a carbonaceous material that can be applied upon activation as conductive filler in composite biomaterials. We combine experimental synthesis and full-atomistic molecular dynamics modeling to synthesize and characterize these conductive composite biomaterials, made entirely from renewable sources and with promising applications in fields like biomedicine, energy, and electronics.