LFEE Seminar on Energy and Environment Sponsored by the MIT Laboratory for Energy and the Environment

Nano-Enabled Energy Conversion and Storage-A New Paradigm

By Joel Schindall, Bernard Gordon Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Associate Director, MIT Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems

Abstract:
Many significant efforts are being made to identify and utilize new energy sources, to increase production of existing sources, to increase conversion and storage efficiency, and, equally important, to reduce pollution. However, incremental improvement will not be sufficient. What is needed are new approaches. At the same time, we are entering an exciting era where we now have the technology to engineer materials on a nanometer scale, i.e. at dimensions comparable to the size of individual atoms and molecules. But what does nanotechnology have to do with the world's massive energy needs? In my address, I will explore nanotechnology as an "outside the box" technology that has the potential to "re-invent" (transform) some long-known but little-used technologies to the point that they may offer significant improvement over the accepted ways of converting and storing energy.

Some of this is already happening. One example is the use of fuel cells for power conversion. Perhaps this is not thought of as nanotechnology, but it typically involves designing and fabricating a nanoscale catalytic structure to implement energy transformation at the molecular level. Another example is the use of nanostructured battery electrodes to increase storage capacity and reduce charging time of traditional chemical batteries.

I believe that the best is yet to come. I will give examples of several "inefficient" technologies which offer the potential of being transformed by nanotechnology to the point that they may be superior to the accepted way of energy processing. One such transformation would be to use capacitors rather than batteries for highly-efficient regenerative energy storage. Ridiculous? Perhaps not. In MIT's Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems (LEES), we are exploring a nanostructured ultracapacitor electrode that has the potential to increase a capacitor's energy storage density to equal that of a chemical battery. Another technology that we are exploring is the use of nanostructured emissive coatings and filters to significantly increase the efficiency of direct thermophotovoltaic (TPV) generation of electricity from heat. I suspect that some of you may be aware of or working on other nano-enabled technologies, and I invite you to add your examples to this list during the seminar.