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    Ensuring a durable transition

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    To fend off the worst impacts of climate change, “we have to decarbonize, and do it even faster,” said William H. Green, director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and Hoyt C. Hottel Professor, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, at MITEI’s Annual Research Conference.“But how the heck do we actually achieve this goal when the United States is in the middle of a divisive election campaign, and globally, we’re facing all kinds of geopolitical conflicts, trade protectionism, weather disasters, increasing demand from developing countries building a middle class, and data centers in countries like the U.S.?”Researchers, government officials, and business leaders convened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sept. 25-26 to wrestle with this vexing question at the conference that was themed, “A durable energy transition: How to stay on track in the face of increasing demand and unpredictable obstacles.”“In this room we have a lot of power,” said Green, “if we work together, convey to all of society what we see as real pathways and policies to solve problems, and take collective action.”The critical role of consensus-building in driving the energy transition arose repeatedly in conference sessions, whether the topic involved developing and adopting new technologies, constructing and siting infrastructure, drafting and passing vital energy policies, or attracting and retaining a skilled workforce.Resolving conflictsThere is “blowback and a social cost” in transitioning away from fossil fuels, said Stephen Ansolabehere, the Frank G. Thompson Professor of Government at Harvard University, in a panel on the social barriers to decarbonization. “Companies need to engage differently and recognize the rights of communities,” he said.Nora DeDontney, director of development at Vineyard Offshore, described her company’s two years of outreach and negotiations to bring large cables from ocean-based wind turbines onshore.“Our motto is, ‘community first,’” she said. Her company works to mitigate any impacts towns might feel because of offshore wind infrastructure construction with projects, such as sewer upgrades; provides workforce training to Tribal Nations; and lays out wind turbines in a manner that provides safe and reliable areas for local fisheries.Elsa A. Olivetti, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT and the lead of the Decarbonization Mission of MIT’s new Climate Project, discussed the urgent need for rapid scale-up of mineral extraction. “Estimates indicate that to electrify the vehicle fleet by 2050, about six new large copper mines need to come on line each year,” she said. To meet the demand for metals in the United States means pushing into Indigenous lands and environmentally sensitive habitats. “The timeline of permitting is not aligned with the temporal acceleration needed,” she said.Larry Susskind, the Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, is trying to resolve such tensions with universities playing the role of mediators. He is creating renewable energy clinics where students train to participate in emerging disputes over siting. “Talk to people before decisions are made, conduct joint fact finding, so that facilities reduce harms and share the benefits,” he said.Clean energy boom and pressureA relatively recent and unforeseen increase in demand for energy comes from data centers, which are being built by large technology companies for new offerings, such as artificial intelligence.“General energy demand was flat for 20 years — and now, boom,” said Sean James, Microsoft’s senior director of data center research. “It caught utilities flatfooted.” With the expansion of AI, the rush to provision data centers with upwards of 35 gigawatts of new (and mainly renewable) power in the near future, intensifies pressure on big companies to balance the concerns of stakeholders across multiple domains. Google is pursuing 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030, said Devon Swezey, the company’s senior manager for global energy and climate.“We’re pursuing this by purchasing more and different types of clean energy locally, and accelerating technological innovation such as next-generation geothermal projects,” he said. Pedro Gómez Lopez, strategy and development director, Ferrovial Digital, which designs and constructs data centers, incorporates renewable energy into their projects, which contributes to decarbonization goals and benefits to locales where they are sited. “We can create a new supply of power, taking the heat generated by a data center to residences or industries in neighborhoods through District Heating initiatives,” he said.The Inflation Reduction Act and other legislation has ramped up employment opportunities in clean energy nationwide, touching every region, including those most tied to fossil fuels. “At the start of 2024 there were about 3.5 million clean energy jobs, with ‘red’ states showing the fastest growth in clean energy jobs,” said David S. Miller, managing partner at Clean Energy Ventures. “The majority (58 percent) of new jobs in energy are now in clean energy — that transition has happened. And one-in-16 new jobs nationwide were in clean energy, with clean energy jobs growing more than three times faster than job growth economy-wide”In this rapid expansion, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) is prioritizing economically marginalized places, according to Zoe Lipman, lead for good jobs and labor standards in the Office of Energy Jobs at the DoE. “The community benefit process is integrated into our funding,” she said. “We are creating the foundation of a virtuous circle,” encouraging benefits to flow to disadvantaged and energy communities, spurring workforce training partnerships, and promoting well-paid union jobs. “These policies incentivize proactive community and labor engagement, and deliver community benefits, both of which are key to building support for technological change.”Hydrogen opportunity and challengeWhile engagement with stakeholders helps clear the path for implementation of technology and the spread of infrastructure, there remain enormous policy, scientific, and engineering challenges to solve, said multiple conference participants. In a “fireside chat,” Prasanna V. Joshi, vice president of low-carbon-solutions technology at ExxonMobil, and Ernest J. Moniz, professor of physics and special advisor to the president at MIT, discussed efforts to replace natural gas and coal with zero-carbon hydrogen in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in such major industries as steel and fertilizer manufacturing.“We have gone into an era of industrial policy,” said Moniz, citing a new DoE program offering incentives to generate demand for hydrogen — more costly than conventional fossil fuels — in end-use applications. “We are going to have to transition from our current approach, which I would call carrots-and-twigs, to ultimately, carrots-and-sticks,” Moniz warned, in order to create “a self-sustaining, major, scalable, affordable hydrogen economy.”To achieve net zero emissions by 2050, ExxonMobil intends to use carbon capture and sequestration in natural gas-based hydrogen and ammonia production. Ammonia can also serve as a zero-carbon fuel. Industry is exploring burning ammonia directly in coal-fired power plants to extend the hydrogen value chain. But there are challenges. “How do you burn 100 percent ammonia?”, asked Joshi. “That’s one of the key technology breakthroughs that’s needed.” Joshi believes that collaboration with MIT’s “ecosystem of breakthrough innovation” will be essential to breaking logjams around the hydrogen and ammonia-based industries.MIT ingenuity essentialThe energy transition is placing very different demands on different regions around the world. Take India, where today per capita power consumption is one of the lowest. But Indians “are an aspirational people … and with increasing urbanization and industrial activity, the growth in power demand is expected to triple by 2050,” said Praveer Sinha, CEO and managing director of the Tata Power Co. Ltd., in his keynote speech. For that nation, which currently relies on coal, the move to clean energy means bringing another 300 gigawatts of zero-carbon capacity online in the next five years. Sinha sees this power coming from wind, solar, and hydro, supplemented by nuclear energy.“India plans to triple nuclear power generation capacity by 2032, and is focusing on advancing small modular reactors,” said Sinha. “The country also needs the rapid deployment of storage solutions to firm up the intermittent power.” The goal is to provide reliable electricity 24/7 to a population living both in large cities and in geographically remote villages, with the help of long-range transmission lines and local microgrids. “India’s energy transition will require innovative and affordable technology solutions, and there is no better place to go than MIT, where you have the best brains, startups, and technology,” he said.These assets were on full display at the conference. Among them a cluster of young businesses, including:the MIT spinout Form Energy, which has developed a 100-hour iron battery as a backstop to renewable energy sources in case of multi-day interruptions;startup Noya that aims for direct air capture of atmospheric CO2 using carbon-based materials;the firm Active Surfaces, with a lightweight material for putting solar photovoltaics in previously inaccessible places;Copernic Catalysts, with new chemistry for making ammonia and sustainable aviation fuel far more inexpensively than current processes; andSesame Sustainability, a software platform spun out of MITEI that gives industries a full financial analysis of the costs and benefits of decarbonization.The pipeline of research talent extended into the undergraduate ranks, with a conference “slam” competition showcasing students’ summer research projects in areas from carbon capture using enzymes to 3D design for the coils used in fusion energy confinement.“MIT students like me are looking to be the next generation of energy leaders, looking for careers where we can apply our engineering skills to tackle exciting climate problems and make a tangible impact,” said Trent Lee, a junior in mechanical engineering researching improvements in lithium-ion energy storage. “We are stoked by the energy transition, because it’s not just the future, but our chance to build it.” More

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      Startup turns mining waste into critical metals for the U.S.

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      At the heart of the energy transition is a metal transition. Wind farms, solar panels, and electric cars require many times more copper, zinc, and nickel than their gas-powered alternatives. They also require more exotic metals with unique properties, known as rare earth elements, which are essential for the magnets that go into things like wind turbines and EV motors.Today, China dominates the processing of rare earth elements, refining around 60 percent of those materials for the world. With demand for such materials forecasted to skyrocket, the Biden administration has said the situation poses national and economic security threats.Substantial quantities of rare earth metals are sitting unused in the United States and many other parts of the world today. The catch is they’re mixed with vast quantities of toxic mining waste.Phoenix Tailings is scaling up a process for harvesting materials, including rare earth metals and nickel, from mining waste. The company uses water and recyclable solvents to collect oxidized metal, then puts the metal into a heated molten salt mixture and applies electricity.The company, co-founded by MIT alumni, says its pilot production facility in Woburn, Massachusetts, is the only site in the world producing rare earth metals without toxic byproducts or carbon emissions. The process does use electricity, but Phoenix Tailings currently offsets that with renewable energy contracts.The company expects to produce more than 3,000 tons of the metals by 2026, which would have represented about 7 percent of total U.S. production last year.Now, with support from the Department of Energy, Phoenix Tailings is expanding the list of metals it can produce and accelerating plans to build a second production facility.For the founding team, including MIT graduates Tomás Villalón ’14 and Michelle Chao ’14 along with Nick Myers and Anthony Balladon, the work has implications for geopolitics and the planet.“Being able to make your own materials domestically means that you’re not at the behest of a foreign monopoly,” Villalón says. “We’re focused on creating critical materials for the next generation of technologies. More broadly, we want to get these materials in ways that are sustainable in the long term.”Tackling a global problemVillalón got interested in chemistry and materials science after taking Course 3.091 (Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry) during his first year at MIT. In his senior year, he got a chance to work at Boston Metal, another MIT spinoff that uses an electrochemical process to decarbonize steelmaking at scale. The experience got Villalón, who majored in materials science and engineering, thinking about creating more sustainable metallurgical processes.But it took a chance meeting with Myers at a 2018 Bible study for Villalón to act on the idea.“We were discussing some of the major problems in the world when we came to the topic of electrification,” Villalón recalls. “It became a discussion about how the U.S. gets its materials and how we should think about electrifying their production. I was finally like, ‘I’ve been working in the space for a decade, let’s go do something about it.’ Nick agreed, but I thought he just wanted to feel good about himself. Then in July, he randomly called me and said, ‘I’ve got [$7,000]. When do we start?’”Villalón brought in Chao, his former MIT classmate and fellow materials science and engineering major, and Myers brought Balladon, a former co-worker, and the founders started experimenting with new processes for producing rare earth metals.“We went back to the base principles, the thermodynamics I learned with MIT professors Antoine Allanore and Donald Sadoway, and understanding the kinetics of reactions,” Villalón says. “Classes like Course 3.022 (Microstructural Evolution in Materials) and 3.07 (Introduction to Ceramics) were also really useful. I touched on every aspect I studied at MIT.”The founders also received guidance from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS) and went through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program. Sadoway served as an advisor for the company.After drafting one version of their system design, the founders bought an experimental quantity of mining waste, known as red sludge, and set up a prototype reactor in Villalón’s backyard. The founders ended up with a small amount of product, but they had to scramble to borrow the scientific equipment needed to determine what exactly it was. It turned out to be a small amount of rare earth concentrate along with pure iron.Today, at the company’s refinery in Woburn, Phoenix Tailings puts mining waste rich in rare earth metals into its mixture and heats it to around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. When it applies an electric current to the mixture, pure metal collects on an electrode. The process leaves minimal waste behind.“The key for all of this isn’t just the chemistry, but how everything is linked together, because with rare earths, you have to hit really high purities compared to a conventionally produced metal,” Villalón explains. “As a result, you have to be thinking about the purity of your material the entire way through.”From rare earths to nickel, magnesium, and moreVillalón says the process is economical compared to conventional production methods, produces no toxic byproducts, and is completely carbon free when renewable energy sources are used for electricity.The Woburn facility is currently producing several rare earth elements for customers, including neodymium and dysprosium, which are important in magnets. Customers are using the materials for things likewind turbines, electric cars, and defense applications.The company has also received two grants with the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program totaling more than $2 million. Its 2023 grant supports the development of a system to extract nickel and magnesium from mining waste through a process that uses carbonization and recycled carbon dioxide. Both nickel and magnesium are critical materials for clean energy applications like batteries.The most recent grant will help the company adapt its process to produce iron from mining waste without emissions or toxic byproducts. Phoenix Tailings says its process is compatible with a wide array of ore types and waste materials, and the company has plenty of material to work with: Mining and processing mineral ores generates about 1.8 billion tons of waste in the U.S. each year.“We want to take our knowledge from processing the rare earth metals and slowly move it into other segments,” Villalón explains. “We simply have to refine some of these materials here. There’s no way we can’t. So, what does that look like from a regulatory perspective? How do we create approaches that are economical and environmentally compliant not just now, but 30 years from now?” More

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      in Energy

      Nanoscale transistors could enable more efficient electronics

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      Silicon transistors, which are used to amplify and switch signals, are a critical component in most electronic devices, from smartphones to automobiles. But silicon semiconductor technology is held back by a fundamental physical limit that prevents transistors from operating below a certain voltage.This limit, known as “Boltzmann tyranny,” hinders the energy efficiency of computers and other electronics, especially with the rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies that demand faster computation.In an effort to overcome this fundamental limit of silicon, MIT researchers fabricated a different type of three-dimensional transistor using a unique set of ultrathin semiconductor materials.Their devices, featuring vertical nanowires only a few nanometers wide, can deliver performance comparable to state-of-the-art silicon transistors while operating efficiently at much lower voltages than conventional devices.“This is a technology with the potential to replace silicon, so you could use it with all the functions that silicon currently has, but with much better energy efficiency,” says Yanjie Shao, an MIT postdoc and lead author of a paper on the new transistors.The transistors leverage quantum mechanical properties to simultaneously achieve low-voltage operation and high performance within an area of just a few square nanometers. Their extremely small size would enable more of these 3D transistors to be packed onto a computer chip, resulting in fast, powerful electronics that are also more energy-efficient.“With conventional physics, there is only so far you can go. The work of Yanjie shows that we can do better than that, but we have to use different physics. There are many challenges yet to be overcome for this approach to be commercial in the future, but conceptually, it really is a breakthrough,” says senior author Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Engineering in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).They are joined on the paper by Ju Li, the Tokyo Electric Power Company Professor in Nuclear Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering at MIT; EECS graduate student Hao Tang; MIT postdoc Baoming Wang; and professors Marco Pala and David Esseni of the University of Udine in Italy. The research appears today in Nature Electronics.Surpassing siliconIn electronic devices, silicon transistors often operate as switches. Applying a voltage to the transistor causes electrons to move over an energy barrier from one side to the other, switching the transistor from “off” to “on.” By switching, transistors represent binary digits to perform computation.A transistor’s switching slope reflects the sharpness of the “off” to “on” transition. The steeper the slope, the less voltage is needed to turn on the transistor and the greater its energy efficiency.But because of how electrons move across an energy barrier, Boltzmann tyranny requires a certain minimum voltage to switch the transistor at room temperature.To overcome the physical limit of silicon, the MIT researchers used a different set of semiconductor materials — gallium antimonide and indium arsenide — and designed their devices to leverage a unique phenomenon in quantum mechanics called quantum tunneling.Quantum tunneling is the ability of electrons to penetrate barriers. The researchers fabricated tunneling transistors, which leverage this property to encourage electrons to push through the energy barrier rather than going over it.“Now, you can turn the device on and off very easily,” Shao says.But while tunneling transistors can enable sharp switching slopes, they typically operate with low current, which hampers the performance of an electronic device. Higher current is necessary to create powerful transistor switches for demanding applications.Fine-grained fabricationUsing tools at MIT.nano, MIT’s state-of-the-art facility for nanoscale research, the engineers were able to carefully control the 3D geometry of their transistors, creating vertical nanowire heterostructures with a diameter of only 6 nanometers. They believe these are the smallest 3D transistors reported to date.Such precise engineering enabled them to achieve a sharp switching slope and high current simultaneously. This is possible because of a phenomenon called quantum confinement.Quantum confinement occurs when an electron is confined to a space that is so small that it can’t move around. When this happens, the effective mass of the electron and the properties of the material change, enabling stronger tunneling of the electron through a barrier.Because the transistors are so small, the researchers can engineer a very strong quantum confinement effect while also fabricating an extremely thin barrier.“We have a lot of flexibility to design these material heterostructures so we can achieve a very thin tunneling barrier, which enables us to get very high current,” Shao says.Precisely fabricating devices that were small enough to accomplish this was a major challenge.“We are really into single-nanometer dimensions with this work. Very few groups in the world can make good transistors in that range. Yanjie is extraordinarily capable to craft such well-functioning transistors that are so extremely small,” says del Alamo.When the researchers tested their devices, the sharpness of the switching slope was below the fundamental limit that can be achieved with conventional silicon transistors. Their devices also performed about 20 times better than similar tunneling transistors.“This is the first time we have been able to achieve such sharp switching steepness with this design,” Shao adds.The researchers are now striving to enhance their fabrication methods to make transistors more uniform across an entire chip. With such small devices, even a 1-nanometer variance can change the behavior of the electrons and affect device operation. They are also exploring vertical fin-shaped structures, in addition to vertical nanowire transistors, which could potentially improve the uniformity of devices on a chip.“This work definitively steps in the right direction, significantly improving the broken-gap tunnel field effect transistor (TFET) performance. It demonstrates steep-slope together with a record drive-current. It highlights the importance of small dimensions, extreme confinement, and low-defectivity materials and interfaces in the fabricated broken-gap TFET. These features have been realized through a well-mastered and nanometer-size-controlled process,” says Aryan Afzalian, a principal member of the technical staff at the nanoelectronics research organization imec, who was not involved with this work.This research is funded, in part, by Intel Corporation. More

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      in Environment

      3 Questions: Can we secure a sustainable supply of nickel?

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      As the world strives to cut back on carbon emissions, demand for minerals and metals needed for clean energy technologies is growing rapidly, sometimes straining existing supply chains and harming local environments. In a new study published today in Joule, Elsa Olivetti, a professor of materials science and engineering and director of the Decarbonizing Energy and Industry mission within MIT’s Climate Project, along with recent graduates Basuhi Ravi PhD ’23 and Karan Bhuwalka PhD ’24 and nine others, examine the case of nickel, which is an essential element for some electric vehicle batteries and parts of some solar panels and wind turbines.How robust is the supply of this vital metal, and what are the implications of its extraction for the local environments, economies, and communities in the places where it is mined? MIT News asked Olivetti, Ravi, and Bhuwalka to explain their findings.Q: Why is nickel becoming more important in the clean energy economy, and what are some of the potential issues in its supply chain?Olivetti: Nickel is increasingly important for its role in EV batteries, as well as other technologies such as wind and solar. For batteries, high-purity nickel sulfate is a key input to the cathodes of EV batteries, which enables high energy density in batteries and increased driving range for EVs. As the world transitions away from fossil fuels, the demand for EVs, and consequently for nickel, has increased dramatically and is projected to continue to do so.The nickel supply chain for battery-grade nickel sulfate includes mining nickel from ore deposits, processing it to a suitable nickel intermediary, and refining it to nickel sulfate. The potential issues in the supply chain can be broadly described as land use concerns in the mining stage, and emissions concerns in the processing stage. This is obviously oversimplified, but as a basic structure for our inquiry we thought about it this way. Nickel mining is land-intensive, leading to deforestation, displacement of communities, and potential contamination of soil and water resources from mining waste. In the processing step, the use of fossil fuels leads to direct emissions including particulate matter and sulfur oxides. In addition, some emerging processing pathways are particularly energy-intensive, which can double the carbon footprint of nickel-rich batteries compared to the current average.Q: What is Indonesia’s role in the global nickel supply, and what are the consequences of nickel extraction there and in other major supply countries?Ravi: Indonesia plays a critical role in nickel supply, holding the world’s largest nickel reserves and supplying nearly half of the globally mined nickel in 2023. The country’s nickel production has seen a remarkable tenfold increase since 2016. This production surge has fueled economic growth in some regions, but also brought notable environmental and social impacts to nickel mining and processing areas.Nickel mining expansion in Indonesia has been linked to health impacts due to air pollution in the islands where nickel processing is prominent, as well as deforestation in some of the most biodiversity-rich locations on the planet. Reports of displacement of indigenous communities, land grabbing, water rights issues, and inadequate job quality in and around mines further highlight the social concerns and unequal distribution of burdens and benefits in Indonesia. Similar concerns exist in other major nickel-producing countries, where mining activities can negatively impact the environment, disrupt livelihoods, and exacerbate inequalities.On a global scale, Indonesia’s reliance on coal-based energy for nickel processing, particularly in energy-intensive smelting and leaching of a clay-like material called laterite, results in a high carbon intensity for nickel produced in the region, compared to other major producing regions such as Australia.Q: What role can industry and policymakers play in helping to meet growing demand while improving environmental safety?Bhuwalka: In consuming countries, policies can foster “discerning demand,” which means creating incentives for companies to source nickel from producers that prioritize sustainability. This can be achieved through regulations that establish acceptable environmental footprints for imported materials, such as limits on carbon emissions from nickel production. For example, the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act and the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act could be leveraged to promote responsible sourcing. Additionally, governments can use their purchasing power to favor sustainably produced nickel in public procurement, which could influence industry practices and encourage the adoption of sustainability standards.On the supply side, nickel-producing countries like Indonesia can implement policies to mitigate the adverse environmental and social impacts of nickel extraction. This includes strengthening environmental regulations and enforcement to reduce the footprint of mining and processing, potentially through stricter pollution limits and responsible mine waste management. In addition, supporting community engagement, implementing benefit-sharing mechanisms, and investing in cleaner nickel processing technologies are also crucial.Internationally, harmonizing sustainability standards and facilitating capacity building and technology transfer between developed and developing countries can create a level playing field and prevent unsustainable practices. Responsible investment practices by international financial institutions, favoring projects that meet high environmental and social standards, can also contribute to a stable and sustainable nickel supply chain. More

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      in Environment

      Translating MIT research into real-world results

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      Inventive solutions to some of the world’s most critical problems are being discovered in labs, classrooms, and centers across MIT every day. Many of these solutions move from the lab to the commercial world with the help of over 85 Institute resources that comprise MIT’s robust innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem. The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) draws on MIT’s wealth of I&E knowledge and experience to help researchers commercialize their breakthrough technologies through the J-WAFS Solutions grant program. By collaborating with I&E programs on campus, J-WAFS prepares MIT researchers for the commercial world, where their novel innovations aim to improve productivity, accessibility, and sustainability of water and food systems, creating economic, environmental, and societal benefits along the way.The J-WAFS Solutions program launched in 2015 with support from Community Jameel, an international organization that advances science and learning for communities to thrive. Since 2015, J-WAFS Solutions has supported 19 projects with one-year grants of up to $150,000, with some projects receiving renewal grants for a second year of support. Solutions projects all address challenges related to water or food. Modeled after the esteemed grant program of MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and initially administered by Deshpande Center staff, the J-WAFS Solutions program follows a similar approach by supporting projects that have already completed the basic research and proof-of-concept phases. With technologies that are one to three years away from commercialization, grantees work on identifying their potential markets and learn to focus on how their technology can meet the needs of future customers.“Ingenuity thrives at MIT, driving inventions that can be translated into real-world applications for widespread adoption, implantation, and use,” says J-WAFS Director Professor John H. Lienhard V. “But successful commercialization of MIT technology requires engineers to focus on many challenges beyond making the technology work. MIT’s I&E network offers a variety of programs that help researchers develop technology readiness, investigate markets, conduct customer discovery, and initiate product design and development,” Lienhard adds. “With this strong I&E framework, many J-WAFS Solutions teams have established startup companies by the completion of the grant. J-WAFS-supported technologies have had powerful, positive effects on human welfare. Together, the J-WAFS Solutions program and MIT’s I&E ecosystem demonstrate how academic research can evolve into business innovations that make a better world,” Lienhard says.Creating I&E collaborationsIn addition to support for furthering research, J-WAFS Solutions grants allow faculty, students, postdocs, and research staff to learn the fundamentals of how to transform their work into commercial products and companies. As part of the grant requirements, researchers must interact with mentors through MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). VMS connects MIT entrepreneurs with teams of carefully selected professionals who provide free and confidential mentorship, guidance, and other services to help advance ideas into for-profit, for-benefit, or nonprofit ventures. Since 2000, VMS has mentored over 4,600 MIT entrepreneurs across all industries, through a dynamic and accomplished group of nearly 200 mentors who volunteer their time so that others may succeed. The mentors provide impartial and unbiased advice to members of the MIT community, including MIT alumni in the Boston area. J-WAFS Solutions teams have been guided by 21 mentors from numerous companies and nonprofits. Mentors often attend project events and progress meetings throughout the grant period.“Working with VMS has provided me and my organization with a valuable sounding board for a range of topics, big and small,” says Eric Verploegen PhD ’08, former research engineer in MIT’s D-Lab and founder of J-WAFS spinout CoolVeg. Along with professors Leon Glicksman and Daniel Frey, Verploegen received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 to commercialize cold-storage chambers that use evaporative cooling to help farmers preserve fruits and vegetables in rural off-grid communities. Verploegen started CoolVeg in 2022 to increase access and adoption of open-source, evaporative cooling technologies through collaborations with businesses, research institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies. “Working as a solo founder at my nonprofit venture, it is always great to have avenues to get feedback on communications approaches, overall strategy, and operational issues that my mentors have experience with,” Verploegen says. Three years after the initial Solutions grant, one of the VMS mentors assigned to the evaporative cooling team still acts as a mentor to Verploegen today.Another Solutions grant requirement is for teams to participate in the Spark program — a free, three-week course that provides an entry point for researchers to explore the potential value of their innovation. Spark is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps), which is an “immersive, entrepreneurial training program that facilitates the transformation of invention to impact.” In 2018, MIT received an award from the NSF, establishing the New England Regional Innovation Corps Node (NE I-Corps) to deliver I-Corps training to participants across New England. Trainings are open to researchers, engineers, scientists, and others who want to engage in a customer discovery process for their technology. Offered regularly throughout the year, the Spark course helps participants identify markets and explore customer needs in order to understand how their technologies can be positioned competitively in their target markets. They learn to assess barriers to adoption, as well as potential regulatory issues or other challenges to commercialization. NE-I-Corps reports that since its start, over 1,200 researchers from MIT have completed the program and have gone on to launch 175 ventures, raising over $3.3 billion in funding from grants and investors, and creating over 1,800 jobs.Constantinos Katsimpouras, a research scientist in the Department of Chemical Engineering, went through the NE I-Corps Spark program to better understand the customer base for a technology he developed with professors Gregory Stephanopoulos and Anthony Sinskey. The group received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 for their microbial platform that converts food waste from the dairy industry into valuable products. “As a scientist with no prior experience in entrepreneurship, the program introduced me to important concepts and tools for conducting customer interviews and adopting a new mindset,” notes Katsimpouras. “Most importantly, it encouraged me to get out of the building and engage in interviews with potential customers and stakeholders, providing me with invaluable insights and a deeper understanding of my industry,” he adds. These interviews also helped connect the team with companies willing to provide resources to test and improve their technology — a critical step to the scale-up of any lab invention.In the case of Professor Cem Tasan’s research group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the I-Corps program led them to the J-WAFS Solutions grant, instead of the other way around. Tasan is currently working with postdoc Onur Guvenc on a J-WAFS Solutions project to manufacture formable sheet metal by consolidating steel scrap without melting, thereby reducing water use compared to traditional steel processing. Before applying for the Solutions grant, Guvenc took part in NE I-Corps. Like Katsimpouras, Guvenc benefited from the interaction with industry. “This program required me to step out of the lab and engage with potential customers, allowing me to learn about their immediate challenges and test my initial assumptions about the market,” Guvenc recalls. “My interviews with industry professionals also made me aware of the connection between water consumption and steelmaking processes, which ultimately led to the J-WAFS 2023 Solutions Grant,” says Guvenc.After completing the Spark program, participants may be eligible to apply for the Fusion program, which provides microgrants of up to $1,500 to conduct further customer discovery. The Fusion program is self-paced, requiring teams to conduct 12 additional customer interviews and craft a final presentation summarizing their key learnings. Professor Patrick Doyle’s J-WAFS Solutions team completed the Spark and Fusion programs at MIT. Most recently, their team was accepted to join the NSF I-Corps National program with a $50,000 award. The intensive program requires teams to complete an additional 100 customer discovery interviews over seven weeks. Located in the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Doyle lab is working on a sustainable microparticle hydrogel system to rapidly remove micropollutants from water. The team’s focus has expanded to higher value purifications in amino acid and biopharmaceutical manufacturing applications. Devashish Gokhale PhD ’24 worked with Doyle on much of the underlying science.“Our platform technology could potentially be used for selective separations in very diverse market segments, ranging from individual consumers to large industries and government bodies with varied use-cases,” Gokhale explains. He goes on to say, “The I-Corps Spark program added significant value by providing me with an effective framework to approach this problem … I was assigned a mentor who provided critical feedback, teaching me how to formulate effective questions and identify promising opportunities.” Gokhale says that by the end of Spark, the team was able to identify the best target markets for their products. He also says that the program provided valuable seminars on topics like intellectual property, which was helpful in subsequent discussions the team had with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.Another member of Doyle’s team, Arjav Shah, a recent PhD from MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a current MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is spearheading the team’s commercialization plans. Shah attended Fusion last fall and hopes to lead efforts to incorporate a startup company called hydroGel.  “I admire the hypothesis-driven approach of the I-Corps program,” says Shah. “It has enabled us to identify our customers’ biggest pain points, which will hopefully lead us to finding a product-market fit.” He adds “based on our learnings from the program, we have been able to pivot to impact-driven, higher-value applications in the food processing and biopharmaceutical industries.” Postdoc Luca Mazzaferro will lead the technical team at hydroGel alongside Shah.In a different project, Qinmin Zheng, a postdoc in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working with Professor Andrew Whittle and Lecturer Fábio Duarte. Zheng plans to take the Fusion course this fall to advance their J-WAFS Solutions project that aims to commercialize a novel sensor to quantify the relative abundance of major algal species and provide early detection of harmful algal blooms. After completing Spark, Zheng says he’s “excited to participate in the Fusion program, and potentially the National I-Corps program, to further explore market opportunities and minimize risks in our future product development.”Economic and societal benefitsCommercializing technologies developed at MIT is one of the ways J-WAFS helps ensure that MIT research advances will have real-world impacts in water and food systems. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Solutions program has awarded 28 grants (including renewals), which have supported 19 projects that address a wide range of global water and food challenges. The program has distributed over $4 million to 24 professors, 11 research staff, 15 postdocs, and 30 students across MIT. Nearly half of all J-WAFS Solutions projects have resulted in spinout companies or commercialized products, including eight companies to date plus two open-source technologies.Nona Technologies is an example of a J-WAFS spinout that is helping the world by developing new approaches to produce freshwater for drinking. Desalination — the process of removing salts from seawater — typically requires a large-scale technology called reverse osmosis. But Nona created a desalination device that can work in remote off-grid locations. By separating salt and bacteria from water using electric current through a process called ion concentration polarization (ICP), their technology also reduces overall energy consumption. The novel method was developed by Jongyoon Han, professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering, and research scientist Junghyo Yoon. Along with Bruce Crawford, a Sloan MBA alum, Han and Yoon created Nona Technologies to bring their lightweight, energy-efficient desalination technology to the market.“My feeling early on was that once you have technology, commercialization will take care of itself,” admits Crawford. The team completed both the Spark and Fusion programs and quickly realized that much more work would be required. “Even in our first 24 interviews, we learned that the two first markets we envisioned would not be viable in the near term, and we also got our first hints at the beachhead we ultimately selected,” says Crawford. Nona Technologies has since won MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, received media attention from outlets like Newsweek and Fortune, and hired a team that continues to further the technology for deployment in resource-limited areas where clean drinking water may be scarce. Food-borne diseases sicken millions of people worldwide each year, but J-WAFS researchers are addressing this issue by integrating molecular engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize food pathogen testing. Professors Tim Swager and Alexander Klibanov, of the Department of Chemistry, were awarded one of the first J-WAFS Solutions grants for their sensor that targets food safety pathogens. The sensor uses specialized droplets that behave like a dynamic lens, changing in the presence of target bacteria in order to detect dangerous bacterial contamination in food. In 2018, Swager launched Xibus Systems Inc. to bring the sensor to market and advance food safety for greater public health, sustainability, and economic security.“Our involvement with the J-WAFS Solutions Program has been vital,” says Swager. “It has provided us with a bridge between the academic world and the business world and allowed us to perform more detailed work to create a usable application,” he adds. In 2022, Xibus developed a product called XiSafe, which enables the detection of contaminants like salmonella and listeria faster and with higher sensitivity than other food testing products. The innovation could save food processors billions of dollars worldwide and prevent thousands of food-borne fatalities annually.J-WAFS Solutions companies have raised nearly $66 million in venture capital and other funding. Just this past June, J-WAFS spinout SiTration announced that it raised an $11.8 million seed round. Jeffrey Grossman, a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was another early J-WAFS Solutions grantee for his work on low-cost energy-efficient filters for desalination. The project enabled the development of nanoporous membranes and resulted in two spinout companies, Via Separations and SiTration. SiTration was co-founded by Brendan Smith PhD ’18, who was a part of the original J-WAFS team. Smith is CEO of the company and has overseen the advancement of the membrane technology, which has gone on to reduce cost and resource consumption in industrial wastewater treatment, advanced manufacturing, and resource extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel from recycled electric vehicle batteries. The company also recently announced that it is working with the mining company Rio Tinto to handle harmful wastewater generated at mines.But it’s not just J-WAFS spinout companies that are producing real-world results. Products like the ECC Vial — a portable, low-cost method for E. coli detection in water — have been brought to the market and helped thousands of people. The test kit was developed by MIT D-Lab Lecturer Susan Murcott and Professor Jeffrey Ravel of the MIT History Section. The duo received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2018 to promote safely managed drinking water and improved public health in Nepal, where it is difficult to identify which wells are contaminated by E. coli. By the end of their grant period, the team had manufactured approximately 3,200 units, of which 2,350 were distributed — enough to help 12,000 people in Nepal. The researchers also trained local Nepalese on best manufacturing practices.“It’s very important, in my life experience, to follow your dream and to serve others,” says Murcott. Economic success is important to the health of any venture, whether it’s a company or a product, but equally important is the social impact — a philosophy that J-WAFS research strives to uphold. “Do something because it’s worth doing and because it changes people’s lives and saves lives,” Murcott adds.As J-WAFS prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, we look forward to continued collaboration with MIT’s many I&E programs to advance knowledge and develop solutions that will have tangible effects on the world’s water and food systems.Learn more about the J-WAFS Solutions program and about innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT. More

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      in Energy

      Study of disordered rock salts leads to battery breakthrough

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      For the past decade, disordered rock salt has been studied as a potential breakthrough cathode material for use in lithium-ion batteries and a key to creating low-cost, high-energy storage for everything from cell phones to electric vehicles to renewable energy storage.A new MIT study is making sure the material fulfills that promise.Led by Ju Li, the Tokyo Electric Power Company Professor in Nuclear Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering, a team of researchers describe a new class of partially disordered rock salt cathode, integrated with polyanions — dubbed disordered rock salt-polyanionic spinel, or DRXPS — that delivers high energy density at high voltages with significantly improved cycling stability.“There is typically a trade-off in cathode materials between energy density and cycling stability … and with this work we aim to push the envelope by designing new cathode chemistries,” says Yimeng Huang, a postdoc in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and first author of a paper describing the work published today in Nature Energy. “(This) material family has high energy density and good cycling stability because it integrates two major types of cathode materials, rock salt and polyanionic olivine, so it has the benefits of both.”Importantly, Li adds, the new material family is primarily composed of manganese, an earth-abundant element that is significantly less expensive than elements like nickel and cobalt, which are typically used in cathodes today.“Manganese is at least five times less expensive than nickel, and about 30 times less expensive than cobalt,” Li says. “Manganese is also the one of the keys to achieving higher energy densities, so having that material be much more earth-abundant is a tremendous advantage.”A possible path to renewable energy infrastructureThat advantage will be particularly critical, Li and his co-authors wrote, as the world looks to build the renewable energy infrastructure needed for a low- or no-carbon future.Batteries are a particularly important part of that picture, not only for their potential to decarbonize transportation with electric cars, buses, and trucks, but also because they will be essential to addressing the intermittency issues of wind and solar power by storing excess energy, then feeding it back into the grid at night or on calm days, when renewable generation drops.Given the high cost and relative rarity of materials like cobalt and nickel, they wrote, efforts to rapidly scale up electric storage capacity would likely lead to extreme cost spikes and potentially significant materials shortages.“If we want to have true electrification of energy generation, transportation, and more, we need earth-abundant batteries to store intermittent photovoltaic and wind power,” Li says. “I think this is one of the steps toward that dream.”That sentiment was shared by Gerbrand Ceder, the Samsung Distinguished Chair in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Research and a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.“Lithium-ion batteries are a critical part of the clean energy transition,” Ceder says. “Their continued growth and price decrease depends on the development of inexpensive, high-performance cathode materials made from earth-abundant materials, as presented in this work.”Overcoming obstacles in existing materialsThe new study addresses one of the major challenges facing disordered rock salt cathodes — oxygen mobility.While the materials have long been recognized for offering very high capacity — as much as 350 milliampere-hour per gram — as compared to traditional cathode materials, which typically have capacities of between 190 and 200 milliampere-hour per gram, it is not very stable.The high capacity is contributed partially by oxygen redox, which is activated when the cathode is charged to high voltages. But when that happens, oxygen becomes mobile, leading to reactions with the electrolyte and degradation of the material, eventually leaving it effectively useless after prolonged cycling.To overcome those challenges, Huang added another element — phosphorus — that essentially acts like a glue, holding the oxygen in place to mitigate degradation.“The main innovation here, and the theory behind the design, is that Yimeng added just the right amount of phosphorus, formed so-called polyanions with its neighboring oxygen atoms, into a cation-deficient rock salt structure that can pin them down,” Li explains. “That allows us to basically stop the percolating oxygen transport due to strong covalent bonding between phosphorus and oxygen … meaning we can both utilize the oxygen-contributed capacity, but also have good stability as well.”That ability to charge batteries to higher voltages, Li says, is crucial because it allows for simpler systems to manage the energy they store.“You can say the quality of the energy is higher,” he says. “The higher the voltage per cell, then the less you need to connect them in series in the battery pack, and the simpler the battery management system.”Pointing the way to future studiesWhile the cathode material described in the study could have a transformative impact on lithium-ion battery technology, there are still several avenues for study going forward.Among the areas for future study, Huang says, are efforts to explore new ways to fabricate the material, particularly for morphology and scalability considerations.“Right now, we are using high-energy ball milling for mechanochemical synthesis, and … the resulting morphology is non-uniform and has small average particle size (about 150 nanometers). This method is also not quite scalable,” he says. “We are trying to achieve a more uniform morphology with larger particle sizes using some alternate synthesis methods, which would allow us to increase the volumetric energy density of the material and may allow us to explore some coating methods … which could further improve the battery performance. The future methods, of course, should be industrially scalable.”In addition, he says, the disordered rock salt material by itself is not a particularly good conductor, so significant amounts of carbon — as much as 20 weight percent of the cathode paste — were added to boost its conductivity. If the team can reduce the carbon content in the electrode without sacrificing performance, there will be higher active material content in a battery, leading to an increased practical energy density.“In this paper, we just used Super P, a typical conductive carbon consisting of nanospheres, but they’re not very efficient,” Huang says. “We are now exploring using carbon nanotubes, which could reduce the carbon content to just 1 or 2 weight percent, which could allow us to dramatically increase the amount of the active cathode material.”Aside from decreasing carbon content, making thick electrodes, he adds, is yet another way to increase the practical energy density of the battery. This is another area of research that the team is working on.“This is only the beginning of DRXPS research, since we only explored a few chemistries within its vast compositional space,” he continues. “We can play around with different ratios of lithium, manganese, phosphorus, and oxygen, and with various combinations of other polyanion-forming elements such as boron, silicon, and sulfur.”With optimized compositions, more scalable synthesis methods, better morphology that allows for uniform coatings, lower carbon content, and thicker electrodes, he says, the DRXPS cathode family is very promising in applications of electric vehicles and grid storage, and possibly even in consumer electronics, where the volumetric energy density is very important.This work was supported with funding from the Honda Research Institute USA Inc. and the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and used resources of the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory.  More

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      in Energy

      More durable metals for fusion power reactors

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      For many decades, nuclear fusion power has been viewed as the ultimate energy source. A fusion power plant could generate carbon-free energy at a scale needed to address climate change. And it could be fueled by deuterium recovered from an essentially endless source — seawater.Decades of work and billions of dollars in research funding have yielded many advances, but challenges remain. To Ju Li, the TEPCO Professor in Nuclear Science and Engineering and a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, there are still two big challenges. The first is to build a fusion power plant that generates more energy than is put into it; in other words, it produces a net output of power. Researchers worldwide are making progress toward meeting that goal.The second challenge that Li cites sounds straightforward: “How do we get the heat out?” But understanding the problem and finding a solution are both far from obvious.Research in the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) includes development and testing of advanced materials that may help address those challenges, as well as many other challenges of the energy transition. MITEI has multiple corporate members that have been supporting MIT’s efforts to advance technologies required to harness fusion energy.The problem: An abundance of helium, a destructive forceKey to a fusion reactor is a superheated plasma — an ionized gas — that’s reacting inside a vacuum vessel. As light atoms in the plasma combine to form heavier ones, they release fast neutrons with high kinetic energy that shoot through the surrounding vacuum vessel into a coolant. During this process, those fast neutrons gradually lose their energy by causing radiation damage and generating heat. The heat that’s transferred to the coolant is eventually used to raise steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.The problem is finding a material for the vacuum vessel that remains strong enough to keep the reacting plasma and the coolant apart, while allowing the fast neutrons to pass through to the coolant. If one considers only the damage due to neutrons knocking atoms out of position in the metal structure, the vacuum vessel should last a full decade. However, depending on what materials are used in the fabrication of the vacuum vessel, some projections indicate that the vacuum vessel will last only six to 12 months. Why is that? Today’s nuclear fission reactors also generate neutrons, and those reactors last far longer than a year.The difference is that fusion neutrons possess much higher kinetic energy than fission neutrons do, and as they penetrate the vacuum vessel walls, some of them interact with the nuclei of atoms in the structural material, giving off particles that rapidly turn into helium atoms. The result is hundreds of times more helium atoms than are present in a fission reactor. Those helium atoms look for somewhere to land — a place with low “embedding energy,” a measure that indicates how much energy it takes for a helium atom to be absorbed. As Li explains, “The helium atoms like to go to places with low helium embedding energy.” And in the metals used in fusion vacuum vessels, there are places with relatively low helium embedding energy — namely, naturally occurring openings called grain boundaries.Metals are made up of individual grains inside which atoms are lined up in an orderly fashion. Where the grains come together there are gaps where the atoms don’t line up as well. That open space has relatively low helium embedding energy, so the helium atoms congregate there. Worse still, helium atoms have a repellent interaction with other atoms, so the helium atoms basically push open the grain boundary. Over time, the opening grows into a continuous crack, and the vacuum vessel breaks.That congregation of helium atoms explains why the structure fails much sooner than expected based just on the number of helium atoms that are present. Li offers an analogy to illustrate. “Babylon is a city of a million people. But the claim is that 100 bad persons can destroy the whole city — if all those bad persons work at the city hall.” The solution? Give those bad persons other, more attractive places to go, ideally in their own villages.To Li, the problem and possible solution are the same in a fusion reactor. If many helium atoms go to the grain boundary at once, they can destroy the metal wall. The solution? Add a small amount of a material that has a helium embedding energy even lower than that of the grain boundary. And over the past two years, Li and his team have demonstrated — both theoretically and experimentally — that their diversionary tactic works. By adding nanoscale particles of a carefully selected second material to the metal wall, they’ve found they can keep the helium atoms that form from congregating in the structurally vulnerable grain boundaries in the metal.Looking for helium-absorbing compoundsTo test their idea, So Yeon Kim ScD ’23 of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Haowei Xu PhD ’23 of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering acquired a sample composed of two materials, or “phases,” one with a lower helium embedding energy than the other. They and their collaborators then implanted helium ions into the sample at a temperature similar to that in a fusion reactor and watched as bubbles of helium formed. Transmission electron microscope images confirmed that the helium bubbles occurred predominantly in the phase with the lower helium embedding energy. As Li notes, “All the damage is in that phase — evidence that it protected the phase with the higher embedding energy.”Having confirmed their approach, the researchers were ready to search for helium-absorbing compounds that would work well with iron, which is often the principal metal in vacuum vessel walls. “But calculating helium embedding energy for all sorts of different materials would be computationally demanding and expensive,” says Kim. “We wanted to find a metric that is easy to compute and a reliable indicator of helium embedding energy.”They found such a metric: the “atomic-scale free volume,” which is basically the maximum size of the internal vacant space available for helium atoms to potentially settle. “This is just the radius of the largest sphere that can fit into a given crystal structure,” explains Kim. “It is a simple calculation.” Examination of a series of possible helium-absorbing ceramic materials confirmed that atomic free volume correlates well with helium embedding energy. Moreover, many of the ceramics they investigated have higher free volume, thus lower embedding energy, than the grain boundaries do.However, in order to identify options for the nuclear fusion application, the screening needed to include some other factors. For example, in addition to the atomic free volume, a good second phase must be mechanically robust (able to sustain a load); it must not get very radioactive with neutron exposure; and it must be compatible — but not too cozy — with the surrounding metal, so it disperses well but does not dissolve into the metal. “We want to disperse the ceramic phase uniformly in the bulk metal to ensure that all grain boundary regions are close to the dispersed ceramic phase so it can provide protection to those regions,” says Li. “The two phases need to coexist, so the ceramic won’t either clump together or totally dissolve in the iron.”Using their analytical tools, Kim and Xu examined about 50,000 compounds and identified 750 potential candidates. Of those, a good option for inclusion in a vacuum vessel wall made mainly of iron was iron silicate.Experimental testingThe researchers were ready to examine samples in the lab. To make the composite material for proof-of-concept demonstrations, Kim and collaborators dispersed nanoscale particles of iron silicate into iron and implanted helium into that composite material. She took X-ray diffraction (XRD) images before and after implanting the helium and also computed the XRD patterns. The ratio between the implanted helium and the dispersed iron silicate was carefully controlled to allow a direct comparison between the experimental and computed XRD patterns. The measured XRD intensity changed with the helium implantation exactly as the calculations had predicted. “That agreement confirms that atomic helium is being stored within the bulk lattice of the iron silicate,” says Kim.To follow up, Kim directly counted the number of helium bubbles in the composite. In iron samples without the iron silicate added, grain boundaries were flanked by many helium bubbles. In contrast, in the iron samples with the iron silicate ceramic phase added, helium bubbles were spread throughout the material, with many fewer occurring along the grain boundaries. Thus, the iron silicate had provided sites with low helium-embedding energy that lured the helium atoms away from the grain boundaries, protecting those vulnerable openings and preventing cracks from opening up and causing the vacuum vessel to fail catastrophically.The researchers conclude that adding just 1 percent (by volume) of iron silicate to the iron walls of the vacuum vessel will cut the number of helium bubbles in half and also reduce their diameter by 20 percent — “and having a lot of small bubbles is OK if they’re not in the grain boundaries,” explains Li.Next stepsThus far, Li and his team have gone from computational studies of the problem and a possible solution to experimental demonstrations that confirm their approach. And they’re well on their way to commercial fabrication of components. “We’ve made powders that are compatible with existing commercial 3D printers and are preloaded with helium-absorbing ceramics,” says Li. The helium-absorbing nanoparticles are well dispersed and should provide sufficient helium uptake to protect the vulnerable grain boundaries in the structural metals of the vessel walls. While Li confirms that there’s more scientific and engineering work to be done, he, along with Alexander O’Brien PhD ’23 of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Kang Pyo So, a former postdoc in the same department, have already developed a startup company that’s ready to 3D print structural materials that can meet all the challenges faced by the vacuum vessel inside a fusion reactor.This research was supported by Eni S.p.A. through the MIT Energy Initiative. Additional support was provided by a Kwajeong Scholarship; the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at Idaho National Laboratory; U.S. DOE Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and Creative Materials Discovery Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea. More

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      in Environment

      Mission directors announced for the Climate Project at MIT

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      The Climate Project at MIT has appointed leaders for each of its six focal areas, or Climate Missions, President Sally Kornbluth announced in a letter to the MIT community today.Introduced in February, the Climate Project at MIT is a major new effort to change the trajectory of global climate outcomes for the better over the next decade. The project will focus MIT’s strengths on six broad climate-related areas where progress is urgently needed. The mission directors in these fields, representing diverse areas of expertise, will collaborate with faculty and researchers across MIT, as well as each other, to accelerate solutions that address climate change.“The mission directors will be absolutely central as the Climate Project seeks to marshal the Institute’s talent and resources to research, develop, deploy and scale up serious solutions to help change the planet’s climate trajectory,” Kornbluth wrote in her letter, adding: “To the faculty members taking on these pivotal roles: We could not be more grateful for your skill and commitment, or more enthusiastic about what you can help us all achieve, together.”The Climate Project will expand and accelerate MIT’s efforts to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and respond to climate effects such as extreme heat, rising sea levels, and reduced crop yields. At the urgent pace needed, the project will help the Institute create new external collaborations and deepen existing ones to develop and scale climate solutions.The Institute has pledged an initial $75 million to the project, including $25 million from the MIT Sloan School of Management to launch a complementary effort, the new MIT Climate Policy Center. MIT has more than 300 faculty and senior researchers already working on climate issues, in collaboration with their students and staff. The Climate Project at MIT builds on their work and the Institute’s 2021 “Fast Forward” climate action plan.Richard Lester, MIT’s vice provost for international activities and the Japan Steel Industry Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, has led the Climate Project’s formation; MIT will shortly hire a vice president for climate to oversee the project. The six Climate Missions and the new mission directors are as follows:Decarbonizing energy and industryThis mission supports advances in the electric power grid as well as the transition across all industry — including transportation, computing, heavy production, and manufacturing — to low-emissions pathways.The mission director is Elsa Olivetti PhD ’07, who is MIT’s associate dean of engineering, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering, and a professor of materials science and engineering since 2014.Olivetti analyzes and improves the environmental sustainability of materials throughout the life cycle and across the supply chain, by linking physical and chemical processes to systems impact. She researches materials design and synthesis using natural language processing, builds models of material supply and technology demand, and assesses the potential for recovering value from industrial waste through experimental approaches. Olivetti has experience building partnerships across the Institute and working with industry to implement large-scale climate solutions through her role as co-director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) and as faculty lead for PAIA, an industry consortium on the carbon footprinting of computing.Restoring the atmosphere, protecting the land and oceansThis mission is centered on removing or storing greenhouse gases that have already been emitted into the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide and methane, and on protecting ocean and land ecosystems, including food and water systems.MIT has chosen two mission directors: Andrew Babbin and Jesse Kroll. The two bring together research expertise from two critical domains of the Earth system, oceans and the atmosphere, as well as backgrounds in both the science and engineering underlying our understanding of Earth’s climate. As co-directors, they jointly link MIT’s School of Science and School of Engineering in this domain.Babbin is the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in MIT’s Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate. He is a marine biogeochemist whose specialty is studying the carbon and nitrogen cycle of the oceans, work that is related to evaluating the ocean’s capacity for carbon storage, an essential element of this mission’s work. He has been at MIT since 2017.Kroll is a professor in MIT’s Department of of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a professor of chemical engineering, and the director of the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory. He is a chemist who studies organic compounds and particulate matter in the atmosphere, in order to better understand how perturbations to the atmosphere, both intentional and unintentional, can affect air pollution and climate.Empowering frontline communitiesThis mission focuses on the development of new climate solutions in support of the world’s most vulnerable populations, in areas ranging from health effects to food security, emergency planning, and risk forecasting.The mission director is Miho Mazereeuw, an associate professor of architecture and urbanism in MIT’s Department of Architecture in the School of Architecture and Planning, and director of MIT’s Urban Risk Lab. Mazereeuw researches disaster resilience, climate change, and coastal strategies. Her lab has engaged in design projects ranging from physical objects to software, while exploring methods of engaging communities and governments in preparedness efforts, skills she brings to bear on building strong collaborations with a broad range of stakeholders.Mazereeuw is also co-lead of one of the five projects selected in MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges competition in 2022, an effort to help communities prepare by understanding the risk of extreme weather events for specific locations.Building and adapting healthy, resilient citiesA majority of the world’s population lives in cities, so urban design and planning is a crucial part of climate work, involving transportation, infrastructure, finance, government, and more.Christoph Reinhart, the Alan and Terri Spoon Professor of Architecture and Climate and director of MIT’s Building Technology Program in the School of Architecture and Planning, is the mission director in this area. The Sustainable Design Lab that Reinhart founded when he joined MIT in 2012 has launched several technology startups, including Mapdwell Solar System, now part of Palmetto Clean Technology, as well as Solemma, makers of an environmental building design software used in architectural practice and education worldwide. Reinhart’s online course on Sustainable Building Design has an enrollment of over 55,000 individuals and forms part of MIT’s XSeries Program in Future Energy Systems.Inventing new policy approachesClimate change is a unique crisis. With that in mind, this mission aims to develop new institutional structures and incentives — in carbon markets, finance, trade policy, and more — along with decision support tools and systems for scaling up climate efforts.Christopher Knittel brings extensive knowledge of these topics to the mission director role. The George P. Shultz Professor and Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Knittel has produced high-impact research in multiple areas; his studies on emissions and the automobile industry have evaluated fuel-efficiency standards, changes in vehicle fuel efficiency, market responses to fuel-price changes, and the health impact of automobiles.Beyond that, Knittel has also studied the impact of the energy transition on jobs, conducted high-level evaluations of climate policies, and examined energy market structures. He joined the MIT faculty in 2011. He also serves as the director of the MIT Climate Policy Center, which will work closely with all six missions.Wild cardsThis mission consists of what the Climate Project at MIT calls “unconventional solutions outside the scope of the other missions,” and will have a broad portfolio for innovation.While all the missions will be charged with encouraging unorthodox approaches within their domains, this mission will seek out unconventional solutions outside the scope of the others, and has a broad mandate for promoting them.The mission director in this case is Benedetto Marelli, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Marelli’s research group develops biopolymers and bioinspired materials with reduced environmental impact compared to traditional technologies. He engages with research at multiple scales, including nanofabrication, and the research group has conducted extensive work on food security and safety while exploring new techniques to reduce waste through enhanced food preservation and to precisely deliver agrochemicals in plants and in soil.As Lester and other MIT leaders have noted, the Climate Project at MIT is still being shaped, and will have the flexibility to accommodate a wide range of projects, partnerships, and approaches needed for thoughtful, fast-moving change. By filling out the leadership structure, today’s announcement is a major milestone in making the project operational.In addition to the six Climate Missions, the Climate Project at MIT includes Climate Frontier Projects, which are efforts launched by these missions, and a Climate HQ, which will support fundamental research, education, and outreach, as well as new resources to connect research to the practical work of climate response. More

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      in Energy

      Proton-conducting materials could enable new green energy technologies

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      As the name suggests, most electronic devices today work through the movement of electrons. But materials that can efficiently conduct protons — the nucleus of the hydrogen atom — could be key to a number of important technologies for combating global climate change.Most proton-conducting inorganic materials available now require undesirably high temperatures to achieve sufficiently high conductivity. However, lower-temperature alternatives could enable a variety of technologies, such as more efficient and durable fuel cells to produce clean electricity from hydrogen, electrolyzers to make clean fuels such as hydrogen for transportation, solid-state proton batteries, and even new kinds of computing devices based on iono-electronic effects.In order to advance the development of proton conductors, MIT engineers have identified certain traits of materials that give rise to fast proton conduction. Using those traits quantitatively, the team identified a half-dozen new candidates that show promise as fast proton conductors. Simulations suggest these candidates will perform far better than existing materials, although they still need to be conformed experimentally. In addition to uncovering potential new materials, the research also provides a deeper understanding at the atomic level of how such materials work.The new findings are described in the journal Energy and Environmental Sciences, in a paper by MIT professors Bilge Yildiz and Ju Li, postdocs Pjotrs Zguns and Konstantin Klyukin, and their collaborator Sossina Haile and her students from Northwestern University. Yildiz is the Breene M. Kerr Professor in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering.“Proton conductors are needed in clean energy conversion applications such as fuel cells, where we use hydrogen to produce carbon dioxide-free electricity,” Yildiz explains. “We want to do this process efficiently, and therefore we need materials that can transport protons very fast through such devices.”Present methods of producing hydrogen, for example steam methane reforming, emit a great deal of carbon dioxide. “One way to eliminate that is to electrochemically produce hydrogen from water vapor, and that needs very good proton conductors,” Yildiz says. Production of other important industrial chemicals and potential fuels, such as ammonia, can also be carried out through efficient electrochemical systems that require good proton conductors.But most inorganic materials that conduct protons can only operate at temperatures of 200 to 600 degrees Celsius (roughly 450 to 1,100 Fahrenheit), or even higher. Such temperatures require energy to maintain and can cause degradation of materials. “Going to higher temperatures is not desirable because that makes the whole system more challenging, and the material durability becomes an issue,” Yildiz says. “There is no good inorganic proton conductor at room temperature.” Today, the only known room-temperature proton conductor is a polymeric material that is not practical for applications in computing devices because it can’t easily be scaled down to the nanometer regime, she says.To tackle the problem, the team first needed to develop a basic and quantitative understanding of exactly how proton conduction works, taking a class of inorganic proton conductors, called solid acids. “One has to first understand what governs proton conduction in these inorganic compounds,” she says. While looking at the materials’ atomic configurations, the researchers identified a pair of characteristics that directly relates to the materials’ proton-carrying potential.As Yildiz explains, proton conduction first involves a proton “hopping from a donor oxygen atom to an acceptor oxygen. And then the environment has to reorganize and take the accepted proton away, so that it can hop to another neighboring acceptor, enabling long-range proton diffusion.” This process happens in many inorganic solids, she says. Figuring out how that last part works — how the atomic lattice gets reorganized to take the accepted proton away from the original donor atom — was a key part of this research, she says.The researchers used computer simulations to study a class of materials called solid acids that become good proton conductors above 200 degrees Celsius. This class of materials has a substructure called the polyanion group sublattice, and these groups have to rotate and take the proton away from its original site so it can then transfer to other sites. The researchers were able to identify the phonons that contribute to the flexibility of this sublattice, which is essential for proton conduction. Then they used this information to comb through vast databases of theoretically and experimentally possible compounds, in search of better proton conducting materials.As a result, they found solid acid compounds that are promising proton conductors and that have been developed and produced for a variety of different applications but never before studied as proton conductors; these compounds turned out to have just the right characteristics of lattice flexibility. The team then carried out computer simulations of how the specific materials they identified in their initial screening would perform under relevant temperatures, to confirm their suitability as proton conductors for fuel cells or other uses. Sure enough, they found six promising materials, with predicted proton conduction speeds faster than the best existing solid acid proton conductors.“There are uncertainties in these simulations,” Yildiz cautions. “I don’t want to say exactly how much higher the conductivity will be, but these look very promising. Hopefully this motivates the experimental field to try to synthesize them in different forms and make use of these compounds as proton conductors.”Translating these theoretical findings into practical devices could take some years, she says. The likely first applications would be for electrochemical cells to produce fuels and chemical feedstocks such as hydrogen and ammonia, she says.The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Wallenberg Foundation, and the U.S. National Science Foundation. More