ProfessorDavid McKenzie

Project Opportunities

Title: Polymers for Medical Device Engineering: Physics and Chemistry

Summary of opportunity:

Exciting APA (Industry) scholarship on an ARC Linkage project involving hermetic bonding of polymers. Applicants must be Australian or New Zealand citizens or Australian permanent residents.

Opportunity synopsis:

The student will join a strategic research team which is developing bonding technologies for polymers and focussed on successful commercial outcomes for industry. This PhD position is part of a collaborative research program between the University of Sydney, Cochlear Ltd and Raymax Applications Pty Ltd.

Please note that an additional PhD opportunity exists in Laser and Plasma interactions with Polymers.

Cochlear is a world leading manufacturer of implantable devices for the restoration of hearing to the profoundly deaf. Raymax is a Sydney based company that develops and supplies industrial laser technologies to industry. The project aims to develop hermetic bonding of polymers initially for biomedical applications using laser and plasma physics methods. New technologies will benefit from the ability to produce strong hermetic bonds between polymers without the need for adhesives.

This project is concerned with demonstrating the performance of bonded polymer surfaces, and their suitability for application to implantable medical devices. The project will involve a number of analysis techniques such as stress-strain testing with analysis of failure modes to examine the properties of the bonded components. Accelerated testing of bonded prototype components will be conducted in simulated implant conditions. The resistance of the bonds to permeation by liquids and gases will be determined. Tests for hermeticity and biocompatibility will be developed and conducted with support from Cochlear.

Project Opportunities

Title: Polymers for Medical Device Engineering: Laser and Plasma Interactions

Summary of opportunity:

Exciting APA (Industry) scholarship on an ARC Linkage project involving hermetic bonding of polymers. Applicants must be Australian or New Zealand citizens or Australian permanent residents.

Opportunity synopsis:

The student will join a strategic research team which is developing bonding technologies for polymers and focused on successful commercial outcomes for industry. This PhD position is part of a collaborative research program between the University of Sydney, Cochlear Ltd and Raymax Lasers Pty Ltd.

Please note that an additional PhD opportunity exists in the physics and chemistry of polymer bonds.

Cochlear is a world leading manufacturer of implantable devices for the restoration of hearing to the profoundly deaf. Raymax Lasers is a Sydney based company that develops and supplies industrial laser technologies to industry. The project aims to develop hermetic bonding of polymers initially for biomedical applications using laser and plasma physics methods. New technologies will benefit from the ability to produce strong hermetic bonds between polymers without the need for adhesives.

This project is concerned with modification of polymer surfaces using plasmas and the bonding of the surfaces with state-of-the-art laser technologies. Surface analysis of polymers using techniques such as contact angle measurement and a range of spectroscopies such as FTIR, UV and XPS will be conducted.  Analysis and optimisation of the bonding mechanisms will be carried out using modelling, including finite element methods. This project will involve close interaction with Raymax Lasers.

Project Opportunities

Title: Plasmonics for Protein Attachment

Summary of opportunity:

Plasmonics will be used in combination with ellipsometry to investigate the attachment of biomolecules to surfaces. The structure of the attached layers will be investigated using novel optical methods.
The research project is within a collaborative team that includes researchers in physics, biophysics andbiochemistry. Other researchers including students are working in related fields. The student would learn research techniques in optics, spectroscopy, microscopy and surface analysis. 

Opportunity synopsis:

The attachment of biomolecules to surfaces is a research area with many applications in biosensing and medical diagnostics. In a biosensor, a surface is prepared with sites that are specific to the molecular species that is being targeted. The target may be a toxin, an antibody or a protein specific to a disease. The attachment step is detected by means of a sensitive readout technology. In this project, the readout technology is optical and therefore does not interfere with the attachment process. The challenge is to make the detection sensitive enough so that very small amounts of the targeted species can be detected. We will use fundamental principles of optics that relate to the changes in the polarization state of the light that occur upon attachment of the target molecules at an interface. The polarization state of light is measured in a process known as ellipsometry, a technique in which the phase changes as well as the amplitude changes in a light beam are detected after reflection form a surface. In one version of the technique, a surface plasmon is created on a metal surface as a result of the interaction with light, and this gives a high sensitivity to the detection process. We will use both theoretical methods for calculating the effects of adherent layers on the reflected light beams as well as experiments in which the detection process is set up in the laboratory using a flow cell and our state of the art ellipsometer.

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Project Opportunities

Title: Encapsulated Next generation perovskite solar cells

Summary of opportunity:

This project will build the next generation of photovoltaic solar cells for addressing the air-conditioning load in buildings by converting their facades to energy harvesting surfaces. We will develop low temperature bonding technologies that use field-assisted ion bonding in glass to encapsulate highly efficient transparent solar cells in an insulating glazing.

Opportunity synopsis:

The project will develop skills in the materials physics of glass and the science of solar cells as well as knowledge of the heat island effect in cities and how to manage it. We will have support from companies in the smart buildings industry including local Australian companies as well as international companies.