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

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.

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

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.

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