Prakhar Gautam
TRANSMISSION FROM TENNESSEE
I tinker with projects and gadgets.
I spend a lot of time building, tinkering with projects, taking photos, and writing about science and chemistry of everyday objects.
Who's typing
Hey, I'm Prakhar. I got my Ph.D. in Chemistry from Purdue in Indiana, where I spent most of my time buried in iron coordination chemistry — not the flashiest corner of the periodic table, but a surprisingly deep one once you're actually in it.
The short version of the research: I worked on iron(III) complexes built around a tetradentate TIM ligand scaffold, specifically bis(alkynyl) and bis(aryl) complexes. The point was figuring out whether iron — cheap, abundant, and usually overlooked — could be pushed into doing the kind of catalytic chemistry that's normally reserved for precious metals like platinum or palladium. That turned into multiple papers with two specific ones highlighted below: Fe(III) Bis(Alkynyls) Supported by the TIM Ligand in Organometallics, and Fe(III) TIM Bis(Aryl) Complexes in Inorganic Chemistry.
Now I'm a scientist at Eastman in Tennessee, working on polymer problems. Different chemistry, same instinct for poking at a system until you understand why it does what it does.
Outside the lab, I've been tinkering with stuff since I was a kid. Destroyed a lot of it growing up. Never quite figured out how to reassemble it. Check out my work.
SIDE QUEST // LIVE APP
REDOX BAY
Pick a negative and positive electrolyte, tune the cell, and read the specs — voltage, energy density, efficiency — the way an engineer would size a flow battery.
Open it full-screen →Recent writing
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A $400 million lithography tool comes down to a tin cluster losing its ligands
High-NA EUV scanners run north of $380 million, and none of that engineering determines whether a pattern resolves on the wafer. That comes down to a few-nanometer film of tin-oxo cage clusters — organotin cages replacing the chemically amplified resists that ran out of room at these dimensions.
An EUV photon doesn't gently excite the resist, it ionizes an atom and kicks off a cascade of secondary electrons that do the actual bond-breaking. "Development" turns out to be a ligand-exchange and condensation reaction straight out of coordination chemistry, and even with tin's absorption advantage, shot noise is still an unsolved stochastic defect problem at these pitches.
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GPUs are heading past 1,800 watts, and the paste holding them to the cooler is the bottleneck
TSMC's newest packaging work etches microfluidic channels straight into the chip's own backside, running coolant through the package instead of across a paste joint above it. That's not a curiosity — GPU packages are already pushing past 1,800 watts, and the paste sitting between silicon and cooler has quietly become the bottleneck.
Liquid metal TIMs fix the conductivity problem and bring a new one: gallium eats aluminum on contact, so committing to one means nickel-plated copper everywhere it can reach. Once the heat clears the package, the coolant loop has its own chemistry problem — galvanic corrosion and glycol breaking down into acids that attack the same copper it's supposed to be cooling.
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Vanadium redox flow batteries are massive batteries the size of houses
Lithium-ion packs energy and power into the same box — more storage means more cells, and more cells means more power too, whether you wanted it or not. A flow battery splits the two apart: the electrochemistry happens in a stack, but the actual charge lives in electrolyte sitting in two external tanks, so you can scale energy storage just by making the tanks bigger.
Vanadium is what makes that split practical. Using the same element in different oxidation states on both sides means a little electrolyte crossing the membrane isn't contamination, just vanadium in the wrong tank. It also happens to turn four different colors across its charge cycle, which is a genuinely useful way to eyeball a state of charge.
On the feed
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Investigative tech
404 Media
The one that actually breaks stories instead of rewriting a press release.
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Daily read
The Verge
First tab open most mornings. Good for the gadgets, better for the culture-of-tech stuff.
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Deep dives
Ars Technica
Still explains how the sausage gets made, technically, correctly, at length.
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Toy Camera
Kodak Charmera
A camera the size of a keychain that makes every photo look like it's from 2003. No notes.
Most recent
Redox Bay
Pick a negative and positive electrolyte, tune the cell, and read the specs — voltage, energy density, efficiency — the way an engineer would actually size a flow battery. Real Nernst-equation math behind every number.
See everything →Why I built this
I had to write a research proposal in grad school that involved redox flow batteries. Never got to run the actual experiment — this was the next best thing.
Fun fact
The world's first gigawatt-hour-scale vanadium flow battery came online in Xinjiang, China in 2025 — 200 MW / 1,000 MWh, paired with a 1 GW solar plant, built so the grid stops wasting renewable power it can't otherwise use.
Elsewhere