Complex materials are the future—is Manitoba ready?

By Prasanthi Vasanthakumar

Deep beneath an unassuming parking lot on the Fort Garry campus, you’ll find a research lab that’s high-maintenance and in-demand.

Encased in acoustically sound concrete below the University’s tunnel system, the $17-million Manitoba Institute for Materials (MIM) is a hub for 200-plus researchers and students. It’s here where they develop technology for the next iteration of the electric vehicle, or the protein-rich snack food, or the lifesaving medical tool MRI.

They break it down to the minutiae of a particular material. Teams gather data from a sample region that is less than a hundredth of a thousandth of a human hair in size and show individual atoms. Investigating this molecular make-up requires some unusual building specs to accommodate their oversized—and overly sensitive—equipment.   

“We use the very big to see the very small,” says Derek Oliver, the facility director at MIM, which marked its 10th anniversary this year.

Among their prized tenants: a microscope the size of a vending machine, the first of its kind in Canada and a tool so delicate researchers operate it from outside the space. The pressure waves from their breathing or speech can throw off measurements. (Even the electrical discharge within fluorescent lighting would interfere.) Room temperature must be maintained to within a fraction of a degree to create a stable environment. 

Materials under the microscope can be anything from a rock sample to a ramen noodle, says Oliver, who is also a professor of computer and electrical engineering and department head at UM.

“Each of these different instruments performs a slightly different task and they’re complementary. You need all the pieces of the puzzle.”

With multi-million-dollar machines under one roof, MIM is like “a library of extremely capable tools,” Oliver says. 

They allow researchers from multiple disciplines to “characterize” a material: identify its properties, understand its behaviour, and figure out how to alter it for a particular use. MIM gives access to equipment like electron microscopes and analytical instruments that individual faculties wouldn’t be able to afford on their own. 

That’s why a new $15-million grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and Research Manitoba is a big deal. It’s the second biggest of its kind UM has received. 

“What we’re trying to work on is going to vary and evolve with time. A facility like this needs to provide the resources to support that evolution,” says Oliver.

Indeed, MIM supports the evolving work of different researchers: food scientists trying to find a palatable texture for protein-replacement foods; mechanical engineers looking for new metallic systems to build lighter electric vehicles; chemists creating new battery materials for smart phones; physicists studying magnetic nanoparticles for quantum computing; and biosystems engineers developing materials to heal wounds like large burns.

And this is just scratching the surface of MIM’s work. As a shared resource, the lab is a “springboard for many, many people to do excellent research,” Oliver says. “It exists so that everyone can take on the scientific challenge that’s key for them.”

Scott Kroeker [MSc/95], a chemist in UM’s Faculty of Science, looks at how glass can be used for the safe storage of nuclear waste—a timely topic in the current clean energy economy. 

Nuclear energy offers pros, including low emissions and high power volume, but it’s not without its complications since its waste can take up to 100,000 years to halve its radioactivity. To prevent environmental contamination, it’s stored in a type of speciality glass that is encased in a metal canister where it should remain for millennia. 

Kroeker uses MIM on a weekly basis to see how his glass performs. The lab’s instruments help him tell, for example, how different elements disperse in a piece of glass. Do they distribute evenly throughout the glass or separate into different regions? If they separate, how durable is one region relative to another?

Kroeker has patented one glass and is working to scale it up for use in commercial and industrial settings. As Canada invests in nuclear energy and the concept of small modular reactors gains traction—especially to provide energy security for remote Indigenous communities—his work is poised to make a difference. 

Waste disposal is often seen as the Achilles heel of nuclear power, Kroeker says. “I, myself, have probably spoken those words but I no longer believe them. I think we’ve more or less solved the problem.”

Interestingly, in his pursuit of safe nuclear waste storage, he stumbled upon a different type of glass—one that can solve another problem. Instead of a durable glass, he mistakenly made one that dissolves quickly in water.

“We thought, ‘Okay, this is a big failure.’ But we started to realize that maybe it’s not a failure. Maybe we just need to think about a different application.”

This different application is wound therapy. Elements like silver, zinc and copper that help repair soft tissues can be delivered to burns or ulcers via glass that dissolves in bodily fluids. Over the last two years, Kroeker has focused on how glass composition changes the rate of dissolution—something he relies on MIM to understand. “There’s a lot of potential here,” he says.

Like Kroeker, Mostafa Fayek is tackling nuclear waste storage, but from a different angle. The Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences and director of MIRF looks at how environmental events like glaciers affect naturally occurring uranium deposits. Because these deposits are similar to spent nuclear fuel, Fayek can extrapolate how geological events may affect nuclear waste disposal in Earth’s subsurface.

In addition to his research on nuclear waste storage, Fayek works with industry partners, this time digging for critical minerals. About a year ago, he received a sizable grant in partnership with a few Canadian mining companies to look for lithium, beryllium, gallium and copper in eastern Manitoba and western Ontario.

“A lot of areas of eastern Manitoba have deposits identified back in the 50s and 60s, when no one cared about them,” he says, laughing. “Now, all of a sudden, everybody’s interested in lithium, gallium, beryllium and all this stuff, so we’re going through old reports and saying, ‘Let’s look here, let’s look there.’”

Fayek studies surface rocks to find deposits, which is a less expensive and intrusive exploration technique. When a metal deposit forms, he explains, it tends to create a chemical envelope around the surrounding rock. By examining a thin slice of rock under a microscope at MIM, he can identify the different minerals in the sample. He then uses the equipment at MIRF to quantify mineral concentrations. High concentrations of lithium, for example, can indicate metal deposits below. Industry partners then know where to drill.

He is now developing chemical methods to find critical minerals. “All of this is very exciting,” he says. “And we’re just getting started.”

Fayek’s work is an example of MIM’s broader economic impact. As the only such lab in Manitoba, and even into parts of neighbouring Saskatchewan and Ontario, MIM partners with a slew of external organizations as wide-ranging as the Winnipeg startup Precision ADM (Oliver likens their unique metal part manufacturing to a Star Trek replicator) and the Royal Canadian Mint.

“The technology of coins is actually extremely complex to prevent counterfeiting,” he says.

Businesses also come to MIM with one-off requests. For example, when a manufacturer’s product doesn’t look right, they might ask MIM to help understand why, explains Oliver. And they don’t have to figure out who to ask because all the expertise is available in one place. 

“I say to people outside the institute, ‘I don’t know everything about everything, but I can find you the person who knows what you need to know.’ So MIM and the infrastructure it represents is an investment to Manitoba and its economy. We are an enabler.”