UNG chemistry professor, students' research published in scholarly journal

University of North Georgia (UNG) chemistry professor Dr. Aimée Tomlinson and three of her students hope their research will someday result in improving fighter pilots' field of vision during combat.

With funding from Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Tomlinson and her team, comprised of current UNG student Lily Rainwater and alums David Wheeler('16) and Alexa Green('17), collaborated with a research group from Georgia Tech. The long-term goal of the project was to generate electrochromic materials (which could change from clear to black); basically, a material that will change color when it comes in contact with sunlight.

The USAF's use for the material would be when fighter pilots are using cloud cover for concealment in combat and then come out into direct sunlight at high speed. The pilots are momentarily blinded during the transition when they lower their sun visors, taking a hand off the controls to do so. The researchers want to develop a material to cover either the pilot's visor or the cockpit cowling that will allow a clear to dark transition to occur nearly instantaneously.

The result of their findings from two years of research is a paper titled "Modeling electrochromic polydioxythiophene-containing materials through time-dependent density functional theory ," published in July in the United Kingdom's Royal Society of Chemistry's journal, "Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics."