Roya Maboudian (Advisor)

Research Advised by Professor Roya Maboudian

Tzu Chiao Wei

Postdoctoral Researcher
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Professor Roya Maboudian (Advisor)

Veronica Arriaga

Undergraduate Researcher
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Professor Roya Maboudian (Advisor)
B.S. 2024 (Anticipated)

BPN994: Atomically Dispersed Supported Metal Catalysts for Robust Chemiresistive Gas Sensors (New Project)

Yaprak Ozbakir
2023

Long-term stability of chemiresistive gas sensors is essential for their use in industrial and residential safety and air-quality monitoring systems. Incorporation of noble metals into the gas sensors has been proved to be an effective strategy to enhance their sensitivity and selectivity. However, noble metal particles are prone to poisoning, resulting in catalyst deactivation. Atomically dispersed supported metal catalysts constitute a new class of materials that contains isolated individual atoms or synergistically coupled few-atom ensembles dispersed on, and/or coordinated with...

BPN977: Metal-Loaded Metal Oxide Nanocomposites for Electronic Gas Sensors

Yaprak Ozbakir
Tzu-Chiao Wei
Veronica Arriaga
Sterling Cavanaugh
Carlo Carraro
Roya Maboudian
2023

Semiconducting metal oxides (MOX) such as SnO2 are an industry-standard material for chemiresistive sensing. However, many MOX-based gas sensors suffer from poor sensitivity, limited selectivity—particularly in the presence of water vapor—and insufficient stability. To address these shortcomings, catalytically active noble metals, such as Pd, are loaded onto the MOX materials to form noble metal-loaded MOX nanocomposites. In this work, we focus on Pd-loaded SnO2 (Pd/SnO2) due to their promising sensitivity to and selectivity for CO and CH4. Pd/SnO2 nanocomposites with varying Pd/Sn...

BPN978: Hot Car Studies

Anthony Hon
2023

CO2 Monitoring Inside of a Car Cabin

Young children trapped in a car without adult supervision may suffer life-threatening complications such as hyperthermia and heat stroke from extreme temperatures—which may rise to 130 °F in some cases. Our research aims to ascertain child presence within two to three minutes of unsupervised activity by probing increases in the levels of carbon dioxide emitted during human exhalation. Non-dispersive infrared (NDIR) sensors are employed to measure car carbon dioxide concentrations every two seconds. Specific numerical metrics are then
...

BPN973: Functionalized-Carbon Reinforced Concrete Towards Low-Carbon Intensity Hydrogen Fuel and Smart Concrete

Stuart McElhany
2023

Global usage of concrete has tripled in the last 40 years,[1] and continues to grow rapidly, placing immense pressure on the environment while requiring its use for safe and effective infrastructure. Concrete accounts for roughly 10% of worldwide CO2 emissions annually. A promising method for directly reducing the CO2 emissions associated with concrete is through replacement of cement, the primary binding material in concrete, with a percentage of carbon, creating so called carbon-incorporated cement composites (CCC). Carbon may be sourced from the waste product of methane...

BPN876: Metal-Organic Frameworks for Chemical Sensing with High Selectivity

Alireza Pourghaderi
Isaac Zakaria
2022

A classic challenge in gas sensing is the tunability of the sensing material for the selective absorption of target gases without interference from unwanted species. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), made up of metal-cluster nodes connected by organic linkers, can achieve selective adsorption owing to their high chemical and structural tunability. Their selectivity and flexibility make MOFs attractive for gas sensing, as realized in novel low-power, low-footprint, on-chip devices such as the chemical-sensitive field-effect transistor, previously demonstrated by our group. In this...

Alireza Pourghaderi

Graduate Student Researcher
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Professor Roya Maboudian (Advisor)
Ph.D. 2026 (Anticipated)

My name is Alireza Pourghaderi and I was born in Shiraz, Iran, in 1997. In 2019, I earned my bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. My B.S. thesis focused mainly on nanomaterials and their environmental applications. I used nanomaterials such as MOFs and Nanodiamond in wastewater treatment applications such as dye adsorption and heavy metal removal. To pursue my academic education, I enrolled in the chemical and biomolecular engineering Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, I'm continuing my research on nanomaterials...

BPN913: Mixed-Dye ZIF-8-Based Colorimetric Carbon Dioxide Sensing for Robust Indoor Air Quality Monitoring

Adrian K. Davey
2022

Indoor levels of carbon dioxide (700 parts per million and up), when coupled with volatile organic compounds (VOCs) under most temperature and humidity environments, can induce fatigue, nausea, nasal irritation, and related human health symptoms. Toward the realization of rapid, inexpensive, passive, and visually-obvious indoor gas sensors, we present dye-functionalized metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which employ distinct color changes to measure indoor carbon dioxide concentrations. Our latest generation of the sensor, based on the coupling of multiple dyes blended with MOF...