Armed with $141 million in grants, chemical engineers at the MSU College of Engineering are searching for sustainable energy on three fronts: converting heat to electricity, changing plants into fuels, and storing energy in new, high-tech batteries.
In one program, MSU is the lead institution in a new $12.5 million U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored Energy Frontier Research Center grant focusing on the study of converting heat to electricity. Led by Donald Morelli, the team is working on applications ranging from waste heat recovery from automobiles to solar thermal energy conversion.
“When you burn a gallon of gas in an internal combustion engine, about two-thirds of the energy produced in that process is lost as heat either through the exhaust system or through the radiator,” Morelli says. “But if we can capture some of that energy and turn it into something useful, we can make automobiles more efficient."
Another program involves Bruce Dale, of MSU’s Office of Biobased Technologies. He is a member of the $125 million, five-year U.S. Department of Energy-funded Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.
Dale invented a process to help convert plant materials into fuels. He is now focused on eliminating the “food vs. fuel” dilemma of biofuels by co-producing animal feeds and biofuels.
In addition, researchers have secured about $4 million from federal, state and commercial organizations to develop an advanced battery and capacitor.
Under the leadership of Jeff Sakamoto and Lawrence T. Drzal, new nanomaterials, nanomaterial architectures, processing techniques and electrode designs are being developed to produce high-energy batteries and high-power super capacitors for the personal, transportation and infrastructure sectors for both U.S. Department of Defense and civilian applications.
“We’re trying to improve the energy and power density of lithium-ion batteries so they can be used in electric vehicles,” Sakamoto says. Furthermore, they seek a way to store energy made at various times by wind and solar equipment.
“We have got to solve our fuel problem,” Dale says. “This will be a defining challenge for us for the next few decades. We have to find a way to provide energy for the world that won’t pollute and is sustainable. But it’s not going to happen overnight.”
Video conversations with College of Engineering researchers can be found here.
Source: MSU
Gretchen Cochran, Innovation & Jobs editor, may be reached here.
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