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Sheikh AkbarProfessorPh.D., Purdue University, 1985 Tel. (614) 292-6725 Office: 295B Watts Hall
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Dr. Akbar is the Founder of the NSF Center for Industrial Sensors and Measurements (CISM). His research interests range from basic science to applied engineering. His recent work deals with synthesis-microstructure-property relations of ceramic oxides and nano-structures for chemical sensing and catalysis.
Dr. Akbar received the 1993 B.F. Goodrich Collegiate Inventors Award for the development of a rugged and durable CO/H2 sensor; one of three national awards. He is the recipient of two R&D 100 Awards as part of the 100 best inventions of 2005. He also received the 2005 NASA TGIR Award, the 2002 W.E. Cramer Award of the Central Ohio Section of the American Ceramic Society (ACerS), 2002 Tian Chin Tuan Fellow of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, 2001 Fulrath Award of ACerS and the 1999 Outstanding Materials Engineer (OMSE) Award from Purdue University. He was elected a Fellow of ACerS in 2001. Dr. Akbar serves on the International Advisory Committee of CIMTEC conferences, Executive Committee of the International Meeting on Chemical Sensors (IMCS), Technical Steering Committee of the US-DOE Sensor and Controls Program, and Editorial Board of Ceramics International and Sensor Letters. He has published more than 140 technical papers. He holds 3 patents and has submitted 6 invention disclosures in the area of sensor materials.
Dr. Akbar launched an interdisciplinary course development with funding from NSF-CRCD and OSU Honors House. A unique feature of the course is that graduate students carrying out research are being directly involved in the development and teaching of the new courses through lab design and instructions, development of computer simulation models, etc. To date, 65 students have taken this course and 15 CISM graduate students have directly participated in the teaching of the laboratory and group project components of the CRCD courses. CISM graduate students also provide guidance and help to students doing their senior thesis projects in the area of sensors. Furthermore, they participate in a "sensor-demo" to local high school seniors. This is an annual event involving 40-50 students participating in the demo.
The CRCD program is now being expanded and integrated with the curriculum and training component of the NSF-IGERT program on "Molecular Engineering of Micro-devices (MEMD)". The very first IGERT course entitled, Introduction to MEMD, was developed and organized by Dr. Akbar that was offered in the Spring of 2003. Group projects involving students from different disciplines are the major emphasis of this course. The second IGERT course is a seminar course covering non-technical topics such as business principles, management skills, ethics and globalization. The CRCD and IGERT courses combined with additional technical elective courses from participating departments will allow students a specialization option.
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Figure.1: a. SEM image of nanofibers, scale bar = 1000 nm. b. TEM image of a nanofiber, scale bar = 200 nm. c. Selected area electron diffraction pattern of the nano-fiber. |
Dr. Akbar and his student, Sehoon Yoo, were successful in forming nano-fibers on the surface of sintered titania (TiO2) during exposure to the H2/N2 gas mixture for 8 h at 700°C (Figure 1a). A bright field TEM image of a nanofiber, and an associated selected area electron diffraction (SAED) pattern, are shown in Fig. 1b and c, respectively. SAED patterns obtained at various positions along the length of a given nanofiber indicate that each nanofiber is comprised of rutile single crystal. Such SAED analyses also reveal that the long dimension (fiber axis) of each nanofiber is parallel to the [001] crystallographic direction of rutile.
The process reported here demonstrates a simple, low-cost method of fabricating nano-structured ceramics as a platform for potential applications in chemical sensing, photocatalysis, and biomedical engineering. Moreover, this technique may provide a new avenue for micro- and nano-machining of ceramics, which is often a non-trivial task.
