News

  • Donald Sadoway’s radical rethinking of electricity storage could revitalize renewable-power technologies.

    You have to give Donald Sadoway points for style: Not many professors come to the last class of a semester dressed in black tie, decorate the table with linen and a vase of fresh roses, and toast their students with champagne. But then, Sadoway has a tendency to do things differently.

    Sadoway, the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry at MIT, has earned a crescendo of recognition this year for his pioneering work on an entirely new type of battery, one based on floating layers of high-temperature molten metal and salt. The battery could provide electricity storage on a scale useful to major electric utilities — allowing them to store energy whenever it’s available and cheap, and then pump it back into the grid when it’s most needed. Such storage capability could be the key to making intermittent sources of power — such as sun, wind and tides — a reliable part of the world’s energy supply.

    The innovative approach earned Sadoway a coveted spot at this year’s TED talks; a video of his remarks garnered more than 440,000 views in its first three weeks online. And last week, Time magazine included Sadoway in its annual list of “the 100 most influential people in the world.”

    Finally, Sadoway’s liquid battery project has garnered more than $13 million in government and industry funding, partly from the French energy company Total, provided through the MIT Energy Initiative (not counting money raised by a company founded to commercialize the technology — half of which came from Bill Gates, who watched Sadoway’s lectures via MIT OpenCourseWare).

     

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  • Time magazine names Lo, Sadoway among the world’s ‘most influential’ people

    Several MIT alumni also named to annual list.

    MIT professors Andrew Lo and Donald Sadoway have been named by Time magazine as two of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” for 2012.

    Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), was cited for his "adaptive markets" theory and his belief that “markets are less like rule-based physics and more like messy biological systems,” Time wrote. “Lo is known for his multidisciplinary approach to finance, using everything from statistical analysis to neuroscience to better understand the markets,” the article notes.

    Time cites Sadoway’s work on liquid batteries and his love of teaching, noting that his recent TED talk — in which he makes full use of a chalkboard — has been viewed more than 380,000 times. "In a battery, I strive to maximize electrical potential," Sadoway, a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, says in the article. "When mentoring, I strive to maximize human potential."

    Several alumni also made the list, including online-educator Sal Khan ’98, MEng ‘98, who will be this year’s Commencement speaker; Mario Draghi PhD '77, the head of the European Central Bank; and Benjamin Netanyahu ’75, MS ’76, the prime minister of Israel.

    Read more from the MIT News office.
  • Materials science and engineering professor Harry Tuller and nuclear science and engineering Professor Bilge Yildiz are among the 2012 recipients of the International Union of Materials Research Societies (IUMRS) Somiya Award along with three international collaborators: Professor John Kilner in the Department of Materials at Imperial College; Jose Santiso, a research scientist at CSIC, Barcelona; and Professor Tatsumi Ishihara in the Department of Applied Chemistry at Kyushu University.

    The team was honored for its work on “Design of ionic and mixed conducting ceramics for fuel cell application."

    Yildiz and Tuller have been actively collaborating on chemo-mechanical coupling in mixed ionic electronic conducting oxides in energy conversion devices such as solid oxide fuel cells. Their collaborative research has been supported by US-DOE Basic Energy Sciences and the MIT Energy Initiative.

    The awards ceremony will be held at the IUMRS International Conference on Electronic Materials (ICEM) hosted by the Materials Research Society of Japan on Sept. 27, 2012 at the Conference Awards Ceremony in Yokohama, Japan.

     

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  • Summer Scholars Internship Program

    Each year for 9 weeks during the summer, the MPC co-sponsors a Research Internship Program. The program has brought hundreds of the best science and engineering undergraduates from across the country, to conduct graduate-level materials research. This years Summer Scholar Internship Program will run from June 10, 2012 - August 11, 2012. For more information about the Internship Program please refer to the Summer Scholar Quick Facts or the FAQ portion of our website. Congratulations to the students selected to this years program.

    2012 Interns
    University
    Major
    Eduan Martinez Soto Universidad Metropolitana Applied Mathematics
    Anthony Kinslow North Carolina Agricultural and Tech. State Univ. Civil Engineering
    Pablo Perez University of Turabo Mechanical Engineering
    Cassandra Llano University of Florida Materials Science & Engineering
    Ethan Cottrill Ohio University Chemistry
    Jennifer Gavin Florida State University Mechanical Engineering
    Chi-Sing Ho University of California Berkeley Physics and Applied Mathematics
    Rodolfo Torres-Gavosto University of Kansas Chemistry
    Scott Ho University of Utah Mechanical Engineering
    Rebecca Reitz Brown University Materials Engineering
    Margaret Stevens Mount Holyoke College Physics, Mathematics
    Ross Kemer University of Minnesota Materials Science & Engineering
    Mina-Elraheb University of Florida Materials Science & Engineering
    Eric Metzger St. Olaf College Chemistry
    Jiexi Liao Kennesaw State University Biochemistry

     

  • From spider webs to tangled proteins, Markus Buehler finds the connections between mathematics, molecules and materials.

    If anyone were going to discover the connections between molecular structures, mathematical concepts and musical scores, it’s not surprising that Markus Buehler would be the one. He has built his career on bridging the connections between disparate disciplines, asking simple questions as an approach to understanding the world.

    Buehler grew up around engineering: His father is a mechanical engineer, his mother worked in the automotive industry and his two brothers became engineers as well (one mechanical, one computer). During his youth, Buehler was drawn to understanding how things worked, and started designing and building electronic circuits when he was about 11. Soon after, he began writing programs to regulate common things around his house, such as the household’s solar-panel system for heating water and his electric train setup, automating the switching of tracks. Later, he wrote programs that simulated the dynamics of stock trading.

    In addition to building things, Buehler says, “I enjoyed breaking things apart to learn how they were made, and using what I had learned to build it again with a new approach or with improvements. I built a radio and an intercom system for our house by taking apart telephones. It took a couple of iterations, but I finally got it to work well.”
    Read more from the MIT News Office.
  • Innovative 3-D designs from an MIT team can more than double the solar power generated from a given area.

    Intensive research around the world has focused on improving the performance of solar photovoltaic cells and bringing down their cost. But very little attention has been paid to the best ways of arranging those cells, which are typically placed flat on a rooftop or other surface, or sometimes attached to motorized structures that keep the cells pointed toward the sun as it crosses the sky.

    Now, a team of MIT researchers has come up with a very different approach: building cubes or towers that extend the solar cells upward in three-dimensional configurations. Amazingly, the results from the structures they’ve tested show power output ranging from double to more than 20 times that of fixed flat panels with the same base area.

    The biggest boosts in power were seen in the situations where improvements are most needed: in locations far from the equator, in winter months and on cloudier days. The new findings, based on both computer modeling and outdoor testing of real modules, have been published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science.

    “I think this concept could become an important part of the future of photovoltaics,” says the paper’s senior author, Jeffrey Grossman, the Carl Richard Soderberg Career Development Associate Professor of Power Engineering at MIT.

    Read more from the MIT News office.

2011 Materials Day Poster Session Winners

Congratulations to all the Poster Presenters for a job well done!

Our Poster Session winners this year are:

Continuous Growth of Vertically Aligned Carbon Nanotubes
Sponsor:  NECST
Roberto Guzman de Villoria
Aeronautics and Astronautics DepartmentPoster Session Winners 2011
Professor Brian L. Wardle, Faculty Advisor

Hierarchical Structural Materials with Aligned Carbon Nanotubes for Multi-functional Aplications
Sponsor:  NECST Consortium
Sunny Wicks
Aeronautics and Astronautics Department
Professor Brian L. Wardle, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michael Rubner, Faculty Advisor

III-V Semiconductors for Thermoelectric and Thermophotovoltaic Applications
Sponsor:  S3TEC
Adam Jandl and Roger Jia
Materials Science & Engineering Department
Professor Eugene Fitzgerald, Faculty Advisor


Congratulations also goes the winner of the iPod Touch, Ji Sam Wong, Aeronautics and Astronautics Department.

First Germanium Laser

 

MIT researchers have demonstrated the first laser built from germanium that can produce wavelengths of light useful for optical communication. It’s also the first germanium laser to operate at room temperature. Unlike the materials typically used in lasers, germanium is easy to incorporate into existing processes for manufacturing silicon chips. So the result could prove an important step toward computers that move data — and maybe even perform calculations — using light instead of electricity. But more fundamentally, the researchers have shown that, contrary to prior belief, a class of materials called indirect-band-gap semiconductors can yield practical lasers.

See the MIT News Office for the full story.

first germanium laser

Graphic: Christine Daniloff