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      in Environment

      Oceanographers record the largest predation event ever observed in the ocean

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      There is power in numbers, or so the saying goes. But in the ocean, scientists are finding that fish that group together don’t necessarily survive together. In some cases, the more fish there are, the larger a target they make for predators.This is what MIT and Norwegian oceanographers observed recently when they explored a wide swath of ocean off the coast of Norway during the height of spawning season for capelin — a small Arctic fish about the size of an anchovy. Billions of capelin migrate each February from the edge of the Arctic ice sheet southward to the Norwegian coast, to lay their eggs. Norway’s coastline is also a stopover for capelin’s primary predator, the Atlantic cod. As cod migrate south, they feed on spawning capelin, though scientists have not measured this process over large scales until now.Reporting their findings today in Nature Communications Biology, the MIT team captured interactions between individual migrating cod and spawning capelin, over a huge spatial extent. Using a sonic-based wide-area imaging technique, they watched as random capelin began grouping together to form a massive shoal spanning tens of kilometers. As the capelin shoal formed a sort of ecological “hotspot,” the team observed individual cod begin to group together in response, forming a huge shoal of their own. The swarming cod overtook the capelin, quickly consuming over 10 million fish, estimated to be more than half of the gathered prey.The dramatic encounter, which took place over just a few hours, is the largest such predation event ever recorded, both in terms of the number of individuals involved and the area over which the event occurred.This one event is unlikely to weaken the capelin population as a whole; the preyed-upon shoal represents 0.1 percent of the capelin that spawn in the region. However, as climate change causes the Arctic ice sheet to retreat, capelin will have to swim farther to spawn, making the species more stressed and vulnerable to natural predation events such as the one the team observed. As capelin sustains many fish species, including cod, continuously monitoring their behavior, at a resolution approaching that of individual fish and across large scales spanning tens of thousands of square kilometers, will help efforts to maintain the species and the health of the ocean overall.“In our work we are seeing that natural catastrophic predation events can change the local predator prey balance in a matter of hours,” says Nicholas Makris, professor of mechanical and ocean engineering at MIT. “That’s not an issue for a healthy population with many spatially distributed population centers or ecological hotspots. But as the number of these hotspots deceases due to climate and anthropogenic stresses, the kind of natural ‘catastrophic’ predation event we witnessed of a keystone species could lead to dramatic consequences for that species as well as the many species dependent on them.”Makris’ co-authors on the paper are Shourav Pednekar and Ankita Jain at MIT, and Olav Rune Godø of the Institute of Marine Research in Norway.Bell soundsFor their new study, Makris and his colleagues reanalyzed data that they gathered during a cruise in February of 2014 to the Barents Sea, off the coast of Norway. During that cruise, the team deployed the Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS) system — a sonic imaging technique that employs a vertical acoustic array, attached to the bottom of a boat, to send sound waves down into the ocean and out in all directions. These waves can travel over large distances as they bounce off any obstacles or fish in their path.The same or a second boat, towing an array of acoustic receivers, continuously picks up the scattered and reflected waves, from as far as many tens of kilometers away. Scientists can then analyze the collected waveforms to create instantaneous maps of the ocean over a huge areal extent.Previously, the team reconstructed maps of individual fish and their movements, but could not distinguish between different species. In the new study, the researchers applied a new “multispectral” technique to differentiate between species based on the characteristic acoustic resonance of their swim bladders.“Fish have swim bladders that resonate like bells,” Makris explains. “Cod have large swim bladders that have a low resonance, like a Big Ben bell, whereas capelin have tiny swim bladders that resonate like the highest notes on a piano.”By reanalyzing OAWRS data to look for specific frequencies of capelin versus cod, the researchers were able to image fish groups, determine their species content, and map the movements of each species over a huge areal extent.Watching a waveThe researchers applied the multi-spectral technique to OAWRS data collected on Feb. 27, 2014, at the peak of the capelin spawning season. In the early morning hours, their new mapping showed that capelin largely kept to themselves, moving as random individuals, in loose clusters along the Norwegian coastline. As the sun rose and lit the surface waters, the capelin began to descend to darker depths, possibly seeking places along the seafloor to spawn.The team observed that as the capelin descended, they began shifting from individual to group behavior, ultimately forming a huge shoal of about 23 million fish that moved in a coordinated wave spanning over ten kilometers long.“What we’re finding is capelin have this critical density, which came out of a physical theory, which we have now observed in the wild,” Makris says. “If they are close enough to each other, they can take on the average speed and direction of other fish that they can sense around them, and can then form a massive and coherent shoal.”As they watched, the shoaling fish began to move as one, in a coherent behavior that has been observed in other species but never in capelin until now. Such coherent migration is thought to help fish save energy over large distances by essentially riding the collective motion of the group.In this instance, however, as soon as the capelin shoal formed, it attracted increasing numbers of cod, which quickly formed a shoal of their own, amounting to about 2.5 million fish, based on the team’s acoustic mapping. Over a few short hours, the cod consumed 10.5 million capelin over tens of kilometers before both shoals dissolved and the fish scattered away. Makris suspects that such massive and coordinated predation is a common occurrence in the ocean, though this is the first time that scientists have been able to document such an event.“It’s the first time seeing predator-prey interaction on a huge scale, and it’s a coherent battle of survival,” Makris says. “This is happening over a monstrous scale, and we’re watching a wave of capelin zoom in, like a wave around a sports stadium, and they kind of gather together to form a defense. It’s also happening with the predators, coming together to coherently attack.”“This is a truly fascinating study that documents complex spatial dynamics linking predators and prey, here cod and capelin, at scales previously unachievable in marine ecosystems,” says George Rose, professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia, who studies the ecology and productivity of cod in the North Atlantic, and was not involved in this work. “Simultaneous species mapping with the OAWRS system…enables insight into fundamental ecological processes with untold potential to enhance current survey methods.”Makris hopes to deploy OAWRS in the future to monitor the large-scale dynamics among other species of fish.“It’s been shown time and again that, when a population is on the verge of collapse, you will have that one last shoal. And when that last big, dense group is gone, there’s a collapse,” Makris says. “So you’ve got to know what’s there before it’s gone, because the pressures are not in their favor.”This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Institute of Marine Research in Norway.  More

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      in Security

      Aspiring to sustainable development

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      In a first for both universities, MIT undergraduates are engaged in research projects at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (UVG), while MIT scholars are collaborating with UVG undergraduates on in-depth field studies in Guatemala.These pilot projects are part of a larger enterprise, called ASPIRE (Achieving Sustainable Partnerships for Innovation, Research, and Entrepreneurship). Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, this five-year, $15-million initiative brings together MIT, UVG, and the Guatemalan Exporters Association to promote sustainable solutions to local development challenges.“This research is yielding insights into our understanding of how to design with and for marginalized people, specifically Indigenous people,” says Elizabeth Hoffecker, co-principal investigator of ASPIRE at MIT and director of the MIT Local Innovation Group.The students’ work is bearing fruit in the form of publications and new products — directly advancing ASPIRE’s goals to create an innovation ecosystem in Guatemala that can be replicated elsewhere in Central and Latin America.For the students, the project offers rewards both tangible and inspirational.“My experience allowed me to find my interest in local innovation and entrepreneurship,” says Ximena Sarmiento García, a fifth-year undergraduate at UVG majoring in anthropology. Supervised by Hoffecker, Sarmiento García says, “I learned how to inform myself, investigate, and find solutions — to become a researcher.”Sandra Youssef, a rising junior in mechanical engineering at MIT, collaborated with UVG researchers and Indigenous farmers to design a mobile cart to improve the harvest yield of snow peas. “It was perfect for me,” she says. “My goal was to use creative, new technologies and science to make a dent in difficult problems.”Remote and effectiveKendra Leith, co-principal investigator of ASPIRE, and associate director for research at MIT D-Lab, shaped the MIT-based undergraduate research opportunities (UROPs) in concert with UVG colleagues. “Although MIT students aren’t currently permitted to travel to Guatemala, I wanted them to have an opportunity to apply their experience and knowledge to address real-world challenges,” says Leith. “The Covid pandemic prepared them and their counterparts at UVG for effective remote collaboration — the UROPs completed remarkably productive research projects over Zoom and met our goals for them.”MIT students participated in some of UVG’s most ambitious ASPIRE research. For instance, Sydney Baller, a rising sophomore in mechanical engineering, joined a team of Indigenous farmers and UVG mechanical engineers investigating the manufacturing process and potential markets for essential oils extracted from thyme, rosemary, and chamomile plants.“Indigenous people have thousands of years working with plant extracts and ancient remedies,” says Baller. “There is promising history there that would be important to follow up with more modern research.”Sandra Youssef used computer-aided design and manufacturing to realize a design created in a hackathon by snow pea farmers. “Our cart had to hold 495 pounds of snow peas without collapsing or overturning, navigate narrow paths on hills, and be simple and inexpensive to assemble,” she says. The snow pea producers have tested two of Youssef’s designs, built by a team at UVG led by Rony Herrarte, a faculty member in the department of mechanical engineering.From waste to filterTwo MIT undergraduates joined one of UVG’s long-standing projects: addressing pollution in Guatemala’s water. The research seeks to use chitosan molecules, extracted from shrimp shells, for bioremediation of heavy metals and other water contaminants. These shells are available in abundance, left as waste by the country’s shrimp industry.Sophomores Ariana Hodlewsky, majoring in chemical engineering, and Paolo Mangiafico, majoring in brain and cognitive sciences, signed on to work with principal investigator and chemistry department instructor Allan Vásquez (UVG) on filtration systems utilizing chitosan.“The team wants to find a cost-effective product rural communities, most at risk from polluted water, can use in homes or in town water systems,” says Mangiafico. “So we have been investigating different technologies for water filtration, and analyzing the Guatemalan and U.S. markets to understand the regulations and opportunities that might affect introduction of a chitosan-based product.”“Our research into how different communities use water and into potential consumers and pitfalls sets the scene for prototypes UVG wants to produce,” says Hodlewsky.Lourdes Figueroa, UVG ASPIRE project manager for technology transfer, found their assistance invaluable.“Paolo and Ariana brought the MIT culture and mindset to the project,” she says. “They wanted to understand not only how the technology works, but the best ways of getting the technology out of the lab to make it useful.”This was an “Aha!” moment, says Figueroa. “The MIT students made a major contribution to both the engineering and marketing sides by emphasizing that you have to think about how to guarantee the market acceptance of the technology while it is still under development.”Innovation ecosystemsUVG’s three campuses have served as incubators for problem-solving innovation and entrepreneurship, in many cases driven by students from Indigenous communities and families. In 2022, Elizabeth Hoffecker, with eight UVG anthropology majors, set out to identify the most vibrant examples of these collaborative initiatives, which ASPIRE seeks to promote and replicate.Hoffecker’s “innovation ecosystem diagnostic” revealed a cluster of activity centered on UVG’s Altiplano campus in the central highlands, which serves Mayan communities. Hoffecker and two of the anthropology students focused on four examples for a series of case studies, which they are currently preparing for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.“The caliber of their work was so good that it became clear to me that we could collaborate on a paper,” says Hoffecker. “It was my first time publishing with undergraduates.”The researchers’ cases included novel production of traditional thread, and creation of a 3D phytoplankton kit that is being used to educate community members about water pollution in Lake Atitlán, a tourist destination that drives the local economy but is increasingly being affected by toxic algae blooms. Hoffecker singles out a project by Indigenous undergraduates who developed play-based teaching tools for introducing basic mathematical concepts.“These connect to local Mayan ways of understanding and offer a novel, hands-on way to strengthen the math teaching skills of local primary school teachers in Indigenous communities,” says Hoffecker. “They created something that addresses a very immediate need in the community — lack of training.Both of Hoffecker’s undergraduate collaborators are writing theses inspired by these case studies.“My time with Elizabeth allowed me to learn how to conduct research from scratch, ask for help, find solutions, and trust myself,” says Sarmiento García. She finds the ASPIRE approach profoundly appealing. “It is not only ethical, but also deeply committed to applying results to the real lives of the people involved.”“This experience has been incredibly positive, validating my own ability to generate knowledge through research, rather than relying only on established authors to back up my arguments,” says Camila del Cid, a fifth-year anthropology student. “This was empowering, especially as a Latin American researcher, because it emphasized that my perspective and contributions are important.”Hoffecker says this pilot run with UVG undergrads produced “high-quality research that can inform evidence-based decision-making on development issues of top regional priority” — a key goal for ASPIRE. Hoffecker plans to “develop a pathway that other UVG students can follow to conduct similar research.”MIT undergraduate research will continue. “Our students’ activities have been very valuable in Guatemala, so much so that the snow pea, chitosan, and essential oils teams would like to continue working with our students this year,” says Leith.  She anticipates a new round of MIT UROPs for next summer.Youssef, for one, is eager to get to work on refining the snow pea cart. “I like the idea of working outside my comfort zone, thinking about things that seem unsolvable and coming up with a solution to fix some aspect of the problem,” she says. More

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      in Environment

      Bubble findings could unlock better electrode and electrolyzer designs

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      Industrial electrochemical processes that use electrodes to produce fuels and chemical products are hampered by the formation of bubbles that block parts of the electrode surface, reducing the area available for the active reaction. Such blockage reduces the performance of the electrodes by anywhere from 10 to 25 percent.But new research reveals a decades-long misunderstanding about the extent of that interference. The findings show exactly how the blocking effect works and could lead to new ways of designing electrode surfaces to minimize inefficiencies in these widely used electrochemical processes.It has long been assumed that the entire area of the electrode shadowed by each bubble would be effectively inactivated. But it turns out that a much smaller area — roughly the area where the bubble actually contacts the surface — is blocked from its electrochemical activity. The new insights could lead directly to new ways of patterning the surfaces to minimize the contact area and improve overall efficiency.The findings are reported today in the journal Nanoscale, in a paper by recent MIT graduate Jack Lake PhD ’23, graduate student Simon Rufer, professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi, research scientist Ben Blaiszik, and six others at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. The team has made available an open-source, AI-based software tool that engineers and scientists can now use to automatically recognize and quantify bubbles formed on a given surface, as a first step toward controlling the electrode material’s properties.

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      Gas-evolving electrodes, often with catalytic surfaces that promote chemical reactions, are used in a wide variety of processes, including the production of “green” hydrogen without the use of fossil fuels, carbon-capture processes that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, aluminum production, and the chlor-alkali process that is used to make widely used chemical products.These are very widespread processes. The chlor-alkali process alone accounts for 2 percent of all U.S. electricity usage; aluminum production accounts for 3 percent of global electricity; and both carbon capture and hydrogen production are likely to grow rapidly in coming years as the world strives to meet greenhouse-gas reduction targets. So, the new findings could make a real difference, Varanasi says.“Our work demonstrates that engineering the contact and growth of bubbles on electrodes can have dramatic effects” on how bubbles form and how they leave the surface, he says. “The knowledge that the area under bubbles can be significantly active ushers in a new set of design rules for high-performance electrodes to avoid the deleterious effects of bubbles.”“The broader literature built over the last couple of decades has suggested that not only that small area of contact but the entire area under the bubble is passivated,” Rufer says. The new study reveals “a significant difference between the two models because it changes how you would develop and design an electrode to minimize these losses.”To test and demonstrate the implications of this effect, the team produced different versions of electrode surfaces with patterns of dots that nucleated and trapped bubbles at different sizes and spacings. They were able to show that surfaces with widely spaced dots promoted large bubble sizes but only tiny areas of surface contact, which helped to make clear the difference between the expected and actual effects of bubble coverage.Developing the software to detect and quantify bubble formation was necessary for the team’s analysis, Rufer explains. “We wanted to collect a lot of data and look at a lot of different electrodes and different reactions and different bubbles, and they all look slightly different,” he says. Creating a program that could deal with different materials and different lighting and reliably identify and track the bubbles was a tricky process, and machine learning was key to making it work, he says.Using that tool, he says, they were able to collect “really significant amounts of data about the bubbles on a surface, where they are, how big they are, how fast they’re growing, all these different things.” The tool is now freely available for anyone to use via the GitHub repository.By using that tool to correlate the visual measures of bubble formation and evolution with electrical measurements of the electrode’s performance, the researchers were able to disprove the accepted theory and to show that only the area of direct contact is affected. Videos further proved the point, revealing new bubbles actively evolving directly under parts of a larger bubble.The researchers developed a very general methodology that can be applied to characterize and understand the impact of bubbles on any electrode or catalyst surface. They were able to quantify the bubble passivation effects in a new performance metric they call BECSA (Bubble-induced electrochemically active surface), as opposed to ECSA (electrochemically active surface area), that is used in the field. “The BECSA metric was a concept we defined in an earlier study but did not have an effective method to estimate until this work,” says Varanasi.The knowledge that the area under bubbles can be significantly active ushers in a new set of design rules for high-performance electrodes. This means that electrode designers should seek to minimize bubble contact area rather than simply bubble coverage, which can be achieved by controlling the morphology and chemistry of the electrodes. Surfaces engineered to control bubbles can not only improve the overall efficiency of the processes and thus reduce energy use, they can also save on upfront materials costs. Many of these gas-evolving electrodes are coated with catalysts made of expensive metals like platinum or iridium, and the findings from this work can be used to engineer electrodes to reduce material wasted by reaction-blocking bubbles.Varanasi says that “the insights from this work could inspire new electrode architectures that not only reduce the usage of precious materials, but also improve the overall electrolyzer performance,” both of which would provide large-scale environmental benefits.The research team included Jim James, Nathan Pruyne, Aristana Scourtas, Marcus Schwarting, Aadit Ambalkar, Ian Foster, and Ben Blaiszik at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under the ARPA-E program. More

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      in Environment

      Solar-powered desalination system requires no extra batteries

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      MIT engineers have built a new desalination system that runs with the rhythms of the sun.The solar-powered system removes salt from water at a pace that closely follows changes in solar energy. As sunlight increases through the day, the system ramps up its desalting process and automatically adjusts to any sudden variation in sunlight, for example by dialing down in response to a passing cloud or revving up as the skies clear.Because the system can quickly react to subtle changes in sunlight, it maximizes the utility of solar energy, producing large quantities of clean water despite variations in sunlight throughout the day. In contrast to other solar-driven desalination designs, the MIT system requires no extra batteries for energy storage, nor a supplemental power supply, such as from the grid.The engineers tested a community-scale prototype on groundwater wells in New Mexico over six months, working in variable weather conditions and water types. The system harnessed on average over 94 percent of the electrical energy generated from the system’s solar panels to produce up to 5,000 liters of water per day despite large swings in weather and available sunlight.“Conventional desalination technologies require steady power and need battery storage to smooth out a variable power source like solar. By continually varying power consumption in sync with the sun, our technology directly and efficiently uses solar power to make water,” says Amos Winter, the Germeshausen Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center at MIT. “Being able to make drinking water with renewables, without requiring battery storage, is a massive grand challenge. And we’ve done it.”The system is geared toward desalinating brackish groundwater — a salty source of water that is found in underground reservoirs and is more prevalent than fresh groundwater resources. The researchers see brackish groundwater as a huge untapped source of potential drinking water, particularly as reserves of fresh water are stressed in parts of the world. They envision that the new renewable, battery-free system could provide much-needed drinking water at low costs, especially for inland communities where access to seawater and grid power are limited.“The majority of the population actually lives far enough from the coast, that seawater desalination could never reach them. They consequently rely heavily on groundwater, especially in remote, low-income regions. And unfortunately, this groundwater is becoming more and more saline due to climate change,” says Jonathan Bessette, MIT PhD student in mechanical engineering. “This technology could bring sustainable, affordable clean water to underreached places around the world.”The researchers report details the new system in a paper appearing today in Nature Water. The study’s co-authors are Bessette, Winter, and staff engineer Shane Pratt.Pump and flowThe new system builds on a previous design, which Winter and his colleagues, including former MIT postdoc Wei He, reported earlier this year. That system aimed to desalinate water through “flexible batch electrodialysis.”Electrodialysis and reverse osmosis are two of the main methods used to desalinate brackish groundwater. With reverse osmosis, pressure is used to pump salty water through a membrane and filter out salts. Electrodialysis uses an electric field to draw out salt ions as water is pumped through a stack of ion-exchange membranes.Scientists have looked to power both methods with renewable sources. But this has been especially challenging for reverse osmosis systems, which traditionally run at a steady power level that’s incompatible with naturally variable energy sources such as the sun.Winter, He, and their colleagues focused on electrodialysis, seeking ways to make a more flexible, “time-variant” system that would be responsive to variations in renewable, solar power.In their previous design, the team built an electrodialysis system consisting of water pumps, an ion-exchange membrane stack, and a solar panel array. The innovation in this system was a model-based control system that used sensor readings from every part of the system to predict the optimal rate at which to pump water through the stack and the voltage that should be applied to the stack to maximize the amount of salt drawn out of the water.When the team tested this system in the field, it was able to vary its water production with the sun’s natural variations. On average, the system directly used 77 percent of the available electrical energy produced by the solar panels, which the team estimated was 91 percent more than traditionally designed solar-powered electrodialysis systems.Still, the researchers felt they could do better.“We could only calculate every three minutes, and in that time, a cloud could literally come by and block the sun,” Winter says. “The system could be saying, ‘I need to run at this high power.’ But some of that power has suddenly dropped because there’s now less sunlight. So, we had to make up that power with extra batteries.”Solar commandsIn their latest work, the researchers looked to eliminate the need for batteries, by shaving the system’s response time to a fraction of a second. The new system is able to update its desalination rate, three to five times per second. The faster response time enables the system to adjust to changes in sunlight throughout the day, without having to make up any lag in power with additional power supplies.The key to the nimbler desalting is a simpler control strategy, devised by Bessette and Pratt. The new strategy is one of “flow-commanded current control,” in which the system first senses the amount of solar power that is being produced by the system’s solar panels. If the panels are generating more power than the system is using, the controller automatically “commands” the system to dial up its pumping, pushing more water through the electrodialysis stacks. Simultaneously, the system diverts some of the additional solar power by increasing the electrical current delivered to the stack, to drive more salt out of the faster-flowing water.“Let’s say the sun is rising every few seconds,” Winter explains. “So, three times a second, we’re looking at the solar panels and saying, ‘Oh, we have more power — let’s bump up our flow rate and current a little bit.’ When we look again and see there’s still more excess power, we’ll up it again. As we do that, we’re able to closely match our consumed power with available solar power really accurately, throughout the day. And the quicker we loop this, the less battery buffering we need.”The engineers incorporated the new control strategy into a fully automated system that they sized to desalinate brackish groundwater at a daily volume that would be enough to supply a small community of about 3,000 people. They operated the system for six months on several wells at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Throughout the trial, the prototype operated under a wide range of solar conditions, harnessing over 94 percent of the solar panel’s electrical energy, on average, to directly power desalination.“Compared to how you would traditionally design a solar desal system, we cut our required battery capacity by almost 100 percent,” Winter says.The engineers plan to further test and scale up the system in hopes of supplying larger communities, and even whole municipalities, with low-cost, fully sun-driven drinking water.“While this is a major step forward, we’re still working diligently to continue developing lower cost, more sustainable desalination methods,” Bessette says.“Our focus now is on testing, maximizing reliability, and building out a product line that can provide desalinated water using renewables to multiple markets around the world,” Pratt adds.The team will be launching a company based on their technology in the coming months.This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, the Julia Burke Foundation, and the MIT Morningside Academy of Design. This work was additionally supported in-kind by Veolia Water Technologies and Solutions and Xylem Goulds.  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

      Affordable high-tech windows for comfort and energy savings

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      Imagine if the windows of your home didn’t transmit heat. They’d keep the heat indoors in winter and outdoors on a hot summer’s day. Your heating and cooling bills would go down; your energy consumption and carbon emissions would drop; and you’d still be comfortable all year ’round.AeroShield, a startup spun out of MIT, is poised to start manufacturing such windows. Building operations make up 36 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and today’s windows are a major contributor to energy inefficiency in buildings. To improve building efficiency, AeroShield has developed a window technology that promises to reduce heat loss by up to 65 percent, significantly reducing energy use and carbon emissions in buildings, and the company just announced the opening of a new facility to manufacture its breakthrough energy-efficient windows.“Our mission is to decarbonize the built environment,” says Elise Strobach SM ’17, PhD ’20, co-founder and CEO of AeroShield. “The availability of affordable, thermally insulating windows will help us achieve that goal while also reducing homeowner’s heating and cooling bills.” According to the U.S. Department of Energy, for most homeowners, 30 percent of that bill results from window inefficiencies.Technology development at MITResearch on AeroShield’s window technology began a decade ago in the MIT lab of Evelyn Wang, Ford Professor of Engineering, now on leave to serve as director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). In late 2014, the MIT team received funding from ARPA-E, and other sponsors followed, including the MIT Energy Initiative through the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design in 2016.The work focused on aerogels, remarkable materials that are ultra-porous, lighter than a marshmallow, strong enough to support a brick, and an unparalleled barrier to heat flow. Aerogels were invented in the 1930s and used by NASA and others as thermal insulation. The team at MIT saw the potential for incorporating aerogel sheets into windows to keep heat from escaping or entering buildings. But there was one problem: Nobody had been able to make aerogels transparent.An aerogel is made of transparent, loosely connected nanoscale silica particles and is 95 percent air. But an aerogel sheet isn’t transparent because light traveling through it gets scattered by the silica particles.After five years of theoretical and experimental work, the MIT team determined that the key to transparency was having the silica particles both small and uniform in size. This allows light to pass directly through, so the aerogel becomes transparent. Indeed, as long as the particle size is small and uniform, increasing the thickness of an aerogel sheet to achieve greater thermal insulation won’t make it less clear.Teams in the MIT lab looked at various applications for their super-insulating, transparent aerogels. Some focused on improving solar thermal collectors by making the systems more efficient and less expensive. But to Strobach, increasing the thermal efficiency of windows looked especially promising and potentially significant as a means of reducing climate change.The researchers determined that aerogel sheets could be inserted into the gap in double-pane windows, making them more than twice as insulating. The windows could then be manufactured on existing production lines with minor changes, and the resulting windows would be affordable and as wide-ranging in style as the window options available today. Best of all, once purchased and installed, the windows would reduce electricity bills, energy use, and carbon emissions.The impact on energy use in buildings could be considerable. “If we only consider winter, windows in the United States lose enough energy to power over 50 million homes,” says Strobach. “That wasted energy generates about 350 million tons of carbon dioxide — more than is emitted by 76 million cars.” Super-insulating windows could help home and building owners reduce carbon dioxide emissions by gigatons while saving billions in heating and cooling costs.The AeroShield storyIn 2019, Strobach and her MIT colleagues — Aaron Baskerville-Bridges MBA ’20, SM ’20 and Kyle Wilke PhD ’19 — co-founded AeroShield to further develop and commercialize their aerogel-based technology for windows and other applications. And in the subsequent five years, their hard work has attracted attention, recently leading to two major accomplishments.In spring 2024, the company announced the opening of its new pilot manufacturing facility in Waltham, Massachusetts, where the team will be producing, testing, and certifying their first full-size windows and patio doors for initial product launch. The 12,000 square foot facility will significantly expand the company’s capabilities, with cutting-edge aerogel R&D labs, manufacturing equipment, assembly lines, and testing equipment. Says Strobach, “Our pilot facility will supply window and door manufacturers as we launch our first products and will also serve as our R&D headquarters as we develop the next generation of energy-efficient products using transparent aerogels.”Also in spring 2024, AeroShield received a $14.5 million award from ARPA-E’s “Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential” (SCALEUP) program, which provides new funding to previous ARPA-E awardees that have “demonstrated a viable path to market.” That funding will enable the company to expand its production capacity to tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of units per year.Strobach also cites two less-obvious benefits of the SCALEUP award.First, the funding is enabling the company to move more quickly on the scale-up phase of their technology development. “We know from our fundamental studies and lab experiments that we can make large-area aerogel sheets that could go in an entry or patio door,” says Elise. “The SCALEUP award allows us to go straight for that vision. We don’t have to do all the incremental sizes of aerogels to prove that we can make a big one. The award provides capital for us to buy the big equipment to make the big aerogel.”Second, the SCALEUP award confirms the viability of the company to other potential investors and collaborators. Indeed, AeroShield recently announced $5 million of additional funding from existing investors Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and MassVentures, as well as new investor MassMutual Ventures. Strobach notes that the company now has investor, engineering, and customer partners.She stresses the importance of partners in achieving AeroShield’s mission. “We know that what we’ve got from a fundamental perspective can change the industry,” she says. “Now we want to go out and do it. With the right partners and at the right pace, we may actually be able to increase the energy efficiency of our buildings early enough to help make a real dent in climate change.” More

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      in Energy

      D-Lab off-grid brooder saves chicks and money using locally manufactured thermal batteries

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      MIT D-Lab students and instructors are improving the efficacy and economics of a brooder technology for newborn chicks that utilizes a practical, local resource: beeswax.Developed through participatory design with agricultural partners in Cameroon, their Off-Grid Brooder is a solution aimed at improving the profitability of the African nation’s small- and medium-scale poultry farms. Since it is common for smallholders in places with poor electricity supply to tend open fires overnight to keep chicks warm, the invention might also let farmers catch up on their sleep.“The target is eight hours. If farmers can sustain the warmth for eight hours, then they get to sleep,” says D-Lab instructor and former student Ahmad (Zak) Zakka SM ’23, who traveled to Cameroon in May to work on implementing brooder improvements tested at the D-Lab, along with D-Lab students, collaborators from African Solar Generation (ASG), and the African Diaspora Council of Switzerland – Branch Cameroon (CDAS–BC).Poultry farming is heavily concentrated in lower- and middle-income countries, where it is an important component of rural economies and provides an inexpensive source of protein for residents. Raising chickens is fraught with economic risk, however, largely because it is hard for small-scale farmers to keep newborn chicks warm enough to survive (33 to 35 degrees Celsius, or 91 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on age). After the cost of feed, firewood used to heat the chick space is the biggest input for rural poultry farmers.According to D-Lab researchers, an average smallholder in Cameroon using traditional brooding methods spends $17 per month on firewood, achieves a 10 percent profit margin, and experiences chick mortality that can be as high as a total loss due to overheating or insufficient heat. The Off-Grid Brooder is designed to replace open fires with inexpensive, renewable, and locally available beeswax — a phase-change material used to make thermal batteries.ASG initially developed a brooder technology, the SolarBox, that used photovoltaic panels and electric batteries to power incandescent bulbs. While this provided effective heating, it was prohibitively expensive and difficult to maintain. In 2020, students from the D-Lab Energy class took on the challenge of reducing the cost and complexity of the SolarBox heating system to make it more accessible to small farmers in Cameroon. Through participatory design — a collaborative approach that involves all stakeholders in early stages of the design process — the team discovered a unique solution. Beeswax stored in a used glass container (such as a mayonnaise jar) is melted using a double boiler over a fire and then installed inside insulated brooder boxes alongside the chicks. As the beeswax cools and solidifies, it releases heat for several hours, keeping the brooder within the temperature range that chicks need to grow and develop. Farmers can then recharge the cooled wax batteries and repeat the process again and again. “The big challenge was how to get heat,” says D-Lab Research Scientist Daniel Sweeney, who, with Zakka, co-teaches two D-Lab classes, 2.651/EC.711 (Introduction to Energy in Global Development), and 2.652/EC.712 (Applications of Energy in Global Development). “Decoupling the heat supplied by biomass (wood) from the heat the chicks need at night in the brooder, that’s the core of the innovation here.”D-Lab instructors, researchers, and students have tested and tuned the system with partners in Cameroon. A research box constructed during a D-Lab trip to Cameroon in January 2023 worked well, but was “very expensive to build,” Zakka says. “The research box was a proof of concept in the field. The next step was to figure out how to make it affordable,” he continues.A new brooder box, made entirely of locally sourced recycled materials at 5 percent of the cost of the research prototype, was developed during D-Lab’s January 2024 trip to Cameroon. Designed and produced in collaboration with CDAS-BC, the new brooder is much more affordable, but its functionality still needs fine-tuning. From late-May through mid-June, the D-Lab team, led by Zakka, worked with Cameroonian collaborators to improve the system again. This time, they assessed the efficacy of using straw, a readily available and low-cost material, arranged in panels to insulate the brooder box.The MIT team was hosted by CDAS-BC, including its president and founder Carole Erlemann Mengue and secretary and treasurer Kathrin Witschi, who operate an organic poultry farm in Afambassi, Cameroon. “The students will experiment with the box and try to improve the insulation of the box without neglecting that the chicks will need ventilation,” they say.In addition, the CDAS-BC partners say that they hoped to explore increasing the number of chicks that the box can keep warm. “If the system could heat 500 to 1,000 chicks at a time,” they note, “it would help farmers save firewood, to sleep through the night, and to minimize the risk of fire in the building and the risk of stepping on chicks while replacing firewood.” Earlier this spring, Erlemann Mengue and Witschi tested the low-cost Off-Grid Brooder Box, which can hold 30 to 40 chicks in its current design.“They were very interested in partnering with us to evaluate the technology. They are running the tests and doing a lot of technical measurement to track the temperature inside the brooder over time,” says Sweeney, adding that the CDAS-BC partners are amassing datasets that they send to the MIT D-Lab team. Sweeney and Zakka, along with PhD candidate Aly Kombargi, who worked on the research box in Cameroon last year, hope to not only improve the functionality of the Off-Grid Poultry Brooder but also broaden its use beyond Cameroon.“The goal of our trip was to have a working prototype, and the goal since then has been to scale this up,” Kombargi says. “It’s absolutely scalable.”Concurring that “the technology should work across developing countries in small-scale poultry sectors,” Zakka says this spring’s D-Lab trip included workshops for area poultry farmers to teach them about benefits of the Off-Grid Brooder and how to make their own. “I’m excited to see if we can get people excited about pushing this as a business … to see if they would build and sell it to other people in the community,” Zakka says.Adds Sweeney, “This isn’t rocket science. If we have some guidance and some open-source information we could share, I’m pretty sure (farmers) could put them together on their own.”Already, he says, partners identified through MIT’s networks in Zambia and Uganda are building their own brooders based on the D-Lab design.MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), which supports research, innovation, and cross-disciplinary collaborations involving water and food systems, awarded the Off-Grid Brooder project a $25,000 research and development grant in 2022. The program is “pleased that the project’s approach was grounded in engagement with MIT students and community collaborators,” says Executive Director Renee Robins. “The participatory design process helped produce innovative prototypes that are already making positive impacts for smallholder poultry farmers.”That process and the very real impact on communities in Cameroon is what draws students to the project and keeps them committed.Sweeney says a recent D-Lab design review for the chick brooder highlighted that the project continued to attract the attention and curiosity of students who participated in earlier stages and still want to be involved.“There’s something about this project. There’s this whole tribe of students that are still active on the broader project,” he says. “There’s something about it.” More

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      in Security

      Pioneering the future of materials extraction

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      The next time you cook pasta, imagine that you are cooking spaghetti, rigatoni, and seven other varieties all together, and they need to be separated onto 10 different plates before serving. A colander can remove the water — but you still have a mound of unsorted noodles. Now imagine that this had to be done for thousands of tons of pasta a day. That gives you an idea of the scale of the problem facing Brendan Smith PhD ’18, co-founder and CEO of SiTration, a startup formed out of MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) in 2020. SiTration, which raised $11.8 million in seed capital led by venture capital firm 2150 earlier this month, is revolutionizing the extraction and refining of copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium, precious metals, and other materials critical to manufacturing clean-energy technologies such as electric motors, wind turbines, and batteries. Its initial target applications are recovering the materials from complex mining feed streams, spent lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles, and various metals refining processes. The company’s breakthrough lies in a new silicon membrane technology that can be adjusted to efficiently recover disparate materials, providing a more sustainable and economically viable alternative to conventional, chemically intensive processes. Think of a colander with adjustable pores to strain different types of pasta. SiTration’s technology has garnered interest from industry players, including mining giant Rio Tinto. Some observers may question whether targeting such different industries could cause the company to lose focus. “But when you dig into these markets, you discover there is actually a significant overlap in how all of these materials are recovered, making it possible for a single solution to have impact across verticals,” Smith says.Powering up materials recoveryConventional methods of extracting critical materials in mining, refining, and recycling lithium-ion batteries involve heavy use of chemicals and heat, which harm the environment. Typically, raw ore from mines or spent batteries are ground into fine particles before being dissolved in acid or incinerated in a furnace. Afterward, they undergo intensive chemical processing to separate and purify the valuable materials. “It requires as much as 10 tons of chemical input to produce one ton of critical material recovered from the mining or battery recycling feedstock,” says Smith. Operators can then sell the recaptured materials back into the supply chain, but suffer from wide swings in profitability due to uncertain market prices. Lithium prices have been the most volatile, having surged more than 400 percent before tumbling back to near-original levels in the past two years. Despite their poor economics and negative environmental impact, these processes remain the state of the art today. By contrast, SiTration is electrifying the critical-materials recovery process, improving efficiency, producing less chemical waste, and reducing the use of chemicals and heat. What’s more, the company’s processing technology is built to be highly adaptable, so it can handle all kinds of materials. The core technology is based on work done at MIT to develop a novel type of membrane made from silicon, which is durable enough to withstand harsh chemicals and high temperatures while conducting electricity. It’s also highly tunable, meaning it can be modified or adjusted to suit different conditions or target specific materials. SiTration’s technology also incorporates electro-extraction, a technique that uses electrochemistry to further isolate and extract specific target materials. This powerful combination of methods in a single system makes it more efficient and effective at isolating and recovering valuable materials, Smith says. So depending on what needs to be separated or extracted, the filtration and electro-extraction processes are adjusted accordingly. “We can produce membranes with pore sizes from the molecular scale up to the size of a human hair in diameter, and everything in between. Combined with the ability to electrify the membrane and separate based on a material’s electrochemical properties, this tunability allows us to target a vast array of different operations and separation applications across industrial fields,” says Smith. Efficient access to materials like lithium, cobalt, and copper — and precious metals like platinum, gold, silver, palladium, and rare-earth elements — is key to unlocking innovation in business and sustainability as the world moves toward electrification and away from fossil fuels.“This is an era when new materials are critical,” says Professor Jeffrey Grossman, co-founder and chief scientist of SiTration and the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems at DMSE. “For so many technologies, they’re both the bottleneck and the opportunity, offering tremendous potential for non-incremental advances. And the role they’re having in commercialization and in entrepreneurship cannot be overstated.”SiTration’s commercial frontierSmith became interested in separation technology in 2013 as a PhD student in Grossman’s DMSE research group, which has focused on the design of new membrane materials for a range of applications. The two shared a curiosity about separation of critical materials and a hunger to advance the technology. After years of study under Grossman’s mentorship, and with support from several MIT incubators and foundations including the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab’s Solutions Program, the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, the Kavanaugh Fellowship, MIT Sandbox, and Venture Mentoring Service, Smith was ready to officially form SiTration in 2020. Grossman has a seat on the board and plays an active role as a strategic and technical advisor. Grossman is involved in several MIT spinoffs and embraces the different imperatives of research versus commercialization. “At SiTration, we’re driving this technology to work at scale. There’s something super exciting about that goal,” he says. “The challenges that come with scaling are very different than the challenges that come in a university lab.” At the same time, although not every research breakthrough becomes a commercial product, open-ended, curiosity-driven knowledge pursuit holds its own crucial value, he adds.It has been rewarding for Grossman to see his technically gifted student and colleague develop a host of other skills the role of CEO demands. Getting out to the market and talking about the technology with potential partners, putting together a dynamic team, discovering the challenges facing industry, drumming up support, early on — those became the most pressing activities on Smith’s agenda. “What’s most fun to me about being a CEO of an early-stage startup is that there are 100 different factors, most people-oriented, that you have to navigate every day. Each stakeholder has different motivations and objectives. And you basically try to fit that all together, to create value for our partners and customers, the company, and for society,” says Smith. “You start with just an idea, and you have to keep leveraging that to form a more and more tangible product, to multiply and progress commercial relationships, and do it all at an ever-expanding scale.” MIT DNA runs deep in the nine-person company, with DMSE grad and former Grossman student Jatin Patil as director of product; Ahmed Helal, from MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, as vice president of research and development; Daniel Bregante, from the Department of Chemistry, as VP of technology; and Sarah Melvin, from the departments of Physics and Political Science, as VP of strategy and operations. Melvin is the first hire devoted to business development. Smith plans to continue expanding the team following the closing of the company’s seed round.  Strategic alliancesBeing a good communicator was important when it came to securing funding, Smith says. SiTration received $2.35 million in pre-seed funding in 2022 led by Azolla Ventures, which reserves its $239 million in investment capital for startups that would not otherwise easily obtain funding. “We invest only in solution areas that can achieve gigaton-scale climate impact by 2050,” says Matthew Nordan, a general partner at Azolla and now SiTration board member. The MIT-affiliated E14 Fund also contributed to the pre-seed round; Azolla and E14 both participated in the recent seed funding round. “Brendan demonstrated an extraordinary ability to go from being a thoughtful scientist to a business leader and thinker who has punched way above his weight in engaging with customers and recruiting a well-balanced team and navigating tricky markets,” says Nordan. One of SiTration’s first partnerships is with Rio Tinto, one of the largest mining companies in the world. As SiTration evaluated various uses cases in its early days, identifying critical materials as its target market, Rio Tinto was looking for partners to recover valuable metals such as cobalt and copper from the wastewater generated at mines. These metals were typically trapped in the water, creating harmful waste and resulting in lost revenue. “We thought this was a great innovation challenge and posted it on our website to scout for companies to partner with who can help us solve this water challenge,” said Nick Gurieff, principal advisor for mine closure, in an interview with MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program in 2023. At SiTration, mining was not yet a market focus, but Smith couldn’t help noticing that Rio Tinto’s needs were in alignment with what his young company offered. SiTration submitted its proposal in August 2022. Gurieff said SiTration’s tunable membrane set it apart. The companies formed a business partnership in June 2023, with SiTration adjusting its membrane to handle mine wastewater and incorporating Rio Tinto feedback to refine the technology. After running tests with water from mine sites, SiTration will begin building a small-scale critical-materials recovery unit, followed by larger-scale systems processing up to 100 cubic meters of water an hour.SiTration’s focused technology development with Rio Tinto puts it in a good position for future market growth, Smith says. “Every ounce of effort and resource we put into developing our product is geared towards creating real-world value. Having an industry-leading partner constantly validating our progress is a tremendous advantage.”It’s a long time from the days when Smith began tinkering with tiny holes in silicon in Grossman’s DMSE lab. Now, they work together as business partners who are scaling up technology to meet a global need. Their joint passion for applying materials innovation to tough problems has served them well. “Materials science and engineering is an engine for a lot of the innovation that is happening today,” Grossman says. “When you look at all of the challenges we face to make the transition to a more sustainable planet, you realize how many of these are materials challenges.” More