Nothing can be more rewarding gift (except the official
title of PhD), than another accepted paper! Justine’s paper “Role of
metal/silicon semiconductor contact engineering for enhanced output current in
micro-sized microbial fuel cells” by Justine Mink, Jhonathan Rojas, Kelly
Rader and Muhammad Mustafa Hussain has
been accepted to physica status solidi A. physica status solidi is devoted to
the thorough peer review and the rapid publication of new and important results
in all fields of solid state and materials physics, from basic science to
applications and devices.
In this paper, We
show that contact engineering plays an important role to extract the maximum
performance from energy harvesters like microbial fuel cells. We experimented
with Schottky and Ohmic methods of fabricating contact areas on silicon in an
MFC contact material study. We utilized the industry standard contact material,
aluminum, as well as a metal whose silicide has recently been recognized for
its improved performance in smallest scale integration requirements, cobalt.
Our study shows that improvements in contact engineering are not only important
for device engineering but also for microsystems.
This study
seals our deal with microbial fuel cell as we are the only group in the world
who have explored every single material aspect of a micro-sized microbial fuel
cell. Congratulations Justine!