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    Secretary of Energy Chris Wright ’85 visits MIT

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    U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright ’85 visited MIT on Monday, meeting Institute leaders, discussing energy innovation at a campus forum, viewing poster presentations from researchers supported through the MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance, and watching energy research demos in the lab where he used to work as a student. “I’ve always been in energy because I think it’s just far and away the world’s most important industry,” Wright said at the forum, which included a panel discussion with business leaders and a fireside chat with MIT Professor Ernest Moniz, who was the U.S. secretary of energy from 2013 to 2017. Wright added: “Not only is it by far the world’s most important industry, because it enables all the others, but it’s also a booming time right now. … It is an awesomely exciting time to be in energy.”Wright was greeted on campus by MIT President Sally Kornbluth, who also gave introductory remarks at the forum, held in MIT’s Samberg Center. While the Institute has added many research facilities and buildings since Wright was a student, Kornbluth observed, the core MIT ethos remains the same.“MIT is still MIT,” Kornbluth said. “It’s a community that rewards merit, boldness, and scientific rigor. And it’s a magnet for people with a drive to solve hard problems that matter in the real world, an enthusiasm for working with industry, and an ethic of national service.”When it comes to energy research, Kornbluth added, “MIT is developing transformational approaches to make American energy more secure, reliable, affordable, and clean — which in turn will strengthen both U.S. competitiveness and national security.”At the event, Wright, the 17th U.S. secretary of energy, engaged in a fireside chat with Moniz, the 13th U.S. secretary of energy, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems Post-Tenure, a special advisor to the MIT president, and the founding director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). Wright began his remarks by reflecting on Kornbluth’s description of the Institute.“Merit, boldness, and scientific rigor,” Wright said. “That is MIT … to me. That hit me hard when I got here, and frankly, it’s a good part of the reason my life has gone the way it’s gone.”On energy topics, Wright emphasized the need for continued innovation in energy across a range of technologies, including fusion, geothermal, and more, while advocating for the benefits of vigorous market-based progress. Before becoming secretary of energy, Wright most recently served as founder and CEO of Liberty Energy. He also was the founder of Pinnacle Technologies, among other enterprises. Wright was confirmed as secretary by the U.S. Senate in February.Asked to name promising areas of technological development, Wright focused on three particular areas of interest. Citing artificial intelligence, he noted that the interest in it was “overwhelming,” with many possible applications. Regarding fusion energy, Wright said, “We are going to see meaningful breakthroughs.” And quantum computing, he added, was going to be a “game-changer” as well.Wright also emphasized the value of federal support for fundamental research, including projects in the national laboratories the Department of Energy oversees.“The 17 national labs we have in this country are absolute jewels. They are gems of this country,” Wright said. He later noted, “There are things, like this foundational research, that are just an essential part of our country and an essential part of our future.”Moniz asked Wright a range of questions in the fireside chat, while adding his own perspective at times about the many issues connected to energy abundance globally.“Climate, energy, security, equity, affordability, have to be recognized as one conversation, and not separate conversations,” Moniz said. “That’s what’s at stake in my view.”Wright’s appearance was part of the Energy Freedom Tour developed by the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), in coordination with the Hamm Institute for American Energy at Oklahoma State University. Later stops are planned for Stanford University and Texas A&M University.Ann Bluntzer Pullin, executive director of the Hamm Institute, gave remarks at the forum as well, noting the importance of making students aware of the energy industry and helping to “get them excited about the impact this career can make.” She also praised MIT’s advances in the field, adding, “This is where so many ideas were born and executed that have allowed America to really thrive in this energy abundance in our country that we have [had] for so long.”The forum also featured remarks from Roger Martella, chief corporate officer, chief sustainability officer, and head of government affairs at GE Vernova. In March, MIT and GE Vernova announced a new five-year joint program, the MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance, featuring research projects, education programs, and career opportunities for MIT students.“That’s what we’re about, electrification as the lifeblood of prosperity,” Martella said, describing GE Vernova’s work. “When we’re here at MIT we feel like we’re living history every moment when we’re walking down the halls, because no institution has [contributed] to innovation and technology more, doing it every single day to advance prosperity for all people around the world.”A panel discussion at the forum featured Wright speaking along with three MIT alumni who are active in the energy business: Carlos Araque ’01, SM ’02, CEO of Quaise Energy, a leading-edge firm in geothermal energy solutions; Bob Mumgaard SM ’15, PhD ’15, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a leading fusion energy firm and an MIT spinout; and Milo Werner SM ’07, MBA ’07, a general partner at DCVC and expert in energy and climate investments. The panel was moderated by Chris Barnard, president of the ACC.Mumgaard noted that Commonwealth Fusion Systems launched in 2018 with “an explicit mission, working with MIT still today, of putting fusion onto an industrial trajectory,” although there is “plenty left to do, still, at that intersection of science, technology, innovation, and business.”Araque said he believes geothermal is “metric-by-metric” more powerful and profitable than many other forms of energy. “This is not a stop-gap,” he added. Quaise is currently developing its first power-plant-scale facility in the U.S.Werner noted that the process of useful innovation only begins in the lab; making an advance commercially viable is the critical next step. The biggest impact “is not in the breakthrough,” she said. “It’s not in the discovery that you make in the lab. It’s actually once you’ve built a billion of them. That’s when you actually change the world.”After the forum, Wright took a tour of multiple research centers on the MIT campus, including the MIT.nano facility, guided by Vladimir Bulović, faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology.At MIT.nano, Bulović showed Wright the Titan Krios G3i, a nearly room-size electron microscope that enables researchers to take a high-resolution look at the structure of tiny particles, with a variety of research applications. The tour also viewed one of MIT.nano’s cleanrooms, a shared fabrication facility used by both MIT researchers and users outside of MIT, including many in industry.On a different note, in an MIT.nano hallway, Bulović showed Wright the One.MIT mosaics, which contain the names of all MIT students and employees past and present — well over 300,000 in all. First etched on a 6-inch wafer, the mosaics are a visual demonstration of the power of nanotechnology — and a searchable display, so Bulović located Wright’s name, which is printed near the chin of one of the figures on the MIT seal.The tour ended in the basement of Building 10, in what is now the refurbished Grainger Energy Machine Facility, where Wright used to conduct research. After earning his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, Wright entered into graduate studies at MIT before leaving, as he recounted at the forum, to pursue business opportunities.At the lab, Wright met with David Perreault, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering; and Steven Leeb, the Emanuel Landsman Professor, a specialist in power systems. A half-dozen MIT graduate students gave Wright demos of their research projects, all involving energy-generation innovations. Wright readily engaged with all the graduate students about the technologies and the parameters of the devices, and asked the students about their own careers.Wright was accompanied on the lab tour by MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, himself an expert in developing energy-efficient systems. Chandrakasan delivered closing remarks at the forum in the Samberg Center, noting MIT’s “strong partnership with the Department of Energy” and its “long and proud history of engaging industry.”As such, Chandrakasan said, MIT has a “role as a resource in service of the nation, so please don’t hesitate to call on us.” More

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      AI system learns from many types of scientific information and runs experiments to discover new materials

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      Machine-learning models can speed up the discovery of new materials by making predictions and suggesting experiments. But most models today only consider a few specific types of data or variables. Compare that with human scientists, who work in a collaborative environment and consider experimental results, the broader scientific literature, imaging and structural analysis, personal experience or intuition, and input from colleagues and peer reviewers.Now, MIT researchers have developed a method for optimizing materials recipes and planning experiments that incorporates information from diverse sources like insights from the literature, chemical compositions, microstructural images, and more. The approach is part of a new platform, named Copilot for Real-world Experimental Scientists (CRESt), that also uses robotic equipment for high-throughput materials testing, the results of which are fed back into large multimodal models to further optimize materials recipes.Human researchers can converse with the system in natural language, with no coding required, and the system makes its own observations and hypotheses along the way. Cameras and visual language models also allow the system to monitor experiments, detect issues, and suggest corrections.“In the field of AI for science, the key is designing new experiments,” says Ju Li, School of Engineering Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering. “We use multimodal feedback — for example information from previous literature on how palladium behaved in fuel cells at this temperature, and human feedback — to complement experimental data and design new experiments. We also use robots to synthesize and characterize the material’s structure and to test performance.”The system is described in a paper published in Nature. The researchers used CRESt to explore more than 900 chemistries and conduct 3,500 electrochemical tests, leading to the discovery of a catalyst material that delivered record power density in a fuel cell that runs on formate salt to produce electricity.Joining Li on the paper as first authors are PhD student Zhen Zhang, Zhichu Ren PhD ’24, PhD student Chia-Wei Hsu, and postdoc Weibin Chen. Their coauthors are MIT Assistant Professor Iwnetim Abate; Associate Professor Pulkit Agrawal; JR East Professor of Engineering Yang Shao-Horn; MIT.nano researcher Aubrey Penn; Zhang-Wei Hong PhD ’25, Hongbin Xu PhD ’25; Daniel Zheng PhD ’25; MIT graduate students Shuhan Miao and Hugh Smith; MIT postdocs Yimeng Huang, Weiyin Chen, Yungsheng Tian, Yifan Gao, and Yaoshen Niu; former MIT postdoc Sipei Li; and collaborators including Chi-Feng Lee, Yu-Cheng Shao, Hsiao-Tsu Wang, and Ying-Rui Lu.

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      A smarter systemMaterials science experiments can be time-consuming and expensive. They require researchers to carefully design workflows, make new material, and run a series of tests and analysis to understand what happened. Those results are then used to decide how to improve the material.To improve the process, some researchers have turned to a machine-learning strategy known as active learning to make efficient use of previous experimental data points and explore or exploit those data. When paired with a statistical technique known as Bayesian optimization (BO), active learning has helped researchers identify new materials for things like batteries and advanced semiconductors.“Bayesian optimization is like Netflix recommending the next movie to watch based on your viewing history, except instead it recommends the next experiment to do,” Li explains. “But basic Bayesian optimization is too simplistic. It uses a boxed-in design space, so if I say I’m going to use platinum, palladium, and iron, it only changes the ratio of those elements in this small space. But real materials have a lot more dependencies, and BO often gets lost.”Most active learning approaches also rely on single data streams that don’t capture everything that goes on in an experiment. To equip computational systems with more human-like knowledge, while still taking advantage of the speed and control of automated systems, Li and his collaborators built CRESt.CRESt’s robotic equipment includes a liquid-handling robot, a carbothermal shock system to rapidly synthesize materials, an automated electrochemical workstation for testing, characterization equipment including automated electron microscopy and optical microscopy, and auxiliary devices such as pumps and gas valves, which can also be remotely controlled.  Many processing parameters can also be tuned.With the user interface, researchers can chat with CRESt and tell it to use active learning to find promising materials recipes for different projects. CRESt can include up to 20 precursor molecules and substrates into its recipe. To guide material designs, CRESt’s models search through scientific papers for descriptions of elements or precursor molecules that might be useful. When human researchers tell CRESt to pursue new recipes, it kicks off a robotic symphony of sample preparation, characterization, and testing. The researcher can also ask CRESt to perform image analysis from scanning electron microscopy imaging, X-ray diffraction, and other sources.Information from those processes is used to train the active learning models, which use both literature knowledge and current experimental results to suggest further experiments and accelerate materials discovery.“For each recipe we use previous literature text or databases, and it creates these huge representations of every recipe based on the previous knowledge base before even doing the experiment,” says Li. “We perform principal component analysis in this knowledge embedding space to get a reduced search space that captures most of the performance variability. Then we use Bayesian optimization in this reduced space to design the new experiment. After the new experiment, we feed newly acquired multimodal experimental data and human feedback into a large language model to augment the knowledgebase and redefine the reduced search space, which gives us a big boost in active learning efficiency.”Materials science experiments can also face reproducibility challenges. To address the problem, CRESt monitors its experiments with cameras, looking for potential problems and suggesting solutions via text and voice to human researchers.The researchers used CRESt to develop an electrode material for an advanced type of high-density fuel cell known as a direct formate fuel cell. After exploring more than 900 chemistries over three months, CRESt discovered a catalyst material made from eight elements that achieved a 9.3-fold improvement in power density per dollar over pure palladium, an expensive precious metal. In further tests, CRESTs material was used to deliver a record power density to a working direct formate fuel cell even though the cell contained just one-fourth of the precious metals of previous devices.The results show the potential for CRESt to find solutions to real-world energy problems that have plagued the materials science and engineering community for decades.“A significant challenge for fuel-cell catalysts is the use of precious metal,” says Zhang. “For fuel cells, researchers have used various precious metals like palladium and platinum. We used a multielement catalyst that also incorporates many other cheap elements to create the optimal coordination environment for catalytic activity and resistance to poisoning species such as carbon monoxide and adsorbed hydrogen atom. People have been searching low-cost options for many years. This system greatly accelerated our search for these catalysts.”A helpful assistantEarly on, poor reproducibility emerged as a major problem that limited the researchers’ ability to perform their new active learning technique on experimental datasets. Material properties can be influenced by the way the precursors are mixed and processed, and any number of problems can subtly alter experimental conditions, requiring careful inspection to correct.To partially automate the process, the researchers coupled computer vision and vision language models with domain knowledge from the scientific literature, which allowed the system to hypothesize sources of irreproducibility and propose solutions. For example, the models can notice when there’s a millimeter-sized deviation in a sample’s shape or when a pipette moves something out of place. The researchers incorporated some of the model’s suggestions, leading to improved consistency, suggesting the models already make good experimental assistants.The researchers noted that humans still performed most of the debugging in their experiments.“CREST is an assistant, not a replacement, for human researchers,” Li says. “Human researchers are still indispensable. In fact, we use natural language so the system can explain what it is doing and present observations and hypotheses. But this is a step toward more flexible, self-driving labs.” More

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      MIT engineers develop a magnetic transistor for more energy-efficient electronics

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      Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity. The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance.The material’s unique magnetic properties also allow for transistors with built-in memory, which would simplify circuit design and unlock new applications for high-performance electronics.“People have known about magnets for thousands of years, but there are very limited ways to incorporate magnetism into electronics. We have shown a new way to efficiently utilize magnetism that opens up a lot of possibilities for future applications and research,” says Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT graduate student in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Physics, and co-lead author of a paper on this advance.Chou is joined on the paper by co-lead author Eugene Park, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Julian Klein, a DMSE research scientist; Josep Ingla-Aynes, a postdoc in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Jagadeesh S. Moodera, a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics; and senior authors Frances Ross, TDK Professor in DMSE; and Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. The paper appears today in Physical Review Letters.Overcoming the limitsIn an electronic device, silicon semiconductor transistors act like tiny light switches that turn a circuit on and off, or amplify weak signals in a communication system. They do this using a small input voltage.But a fundamental physical limit of silicon semiconductors prevents a transistor from operating below a certain voltage, which hinders its energy efficiency.To make more efficient electronics, researchers have spent decades working toward magnetic transistors that utilize electron spin to control the flow of electricity. Electron spin is a fundamental property that enables electrons to behave like tiny magnets.So far, scientists have mostly been limited to using certain magnetic materials. These lack the favorable electronic properties of semiconductors, constraining device performance.“In this work, we combine magnetism and semiconductor physics to realize useful spintronic devices,” Liu says.The researchers replace the silicon in the surface layer of a transistor with chromium sulfur bromide, a two-dimensional material that acts as a magnetic semiconductor.Due to the material’s structure, researchers can switch between two magnetic states very cleanly. This makes it ideal for use in a transistor that smoothly switches between “on” and “off.”“One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding the right material. We tried many other materials that didn’t work,” Chou says.They discovered that changing these magnetic states modifies the material’s electronic properties, enabling low-energy operation. And unlike many other 2D materials, chromium sulfur bromide remains stable in air.To make a transistor, the researchers pattern electrodes onto a silicon substrate, then carefully align and transfer the 2D material on top. They use tape to pick up a tiny piece of material, only a few tens of nanometers thick, and place it onto the substrate.“A lot of researchers will use solvents or glue to do the transfer, but transistors require a very clean surface. We eliminate all those risks by simplifying this step,” Chou says.Leveraging magnetismThis lack of contamination enables their device to outperform existing magnetic transistors. Most others can only create a weak magnetic effect, changing the flow of current by a few percent or less. Their new transistor can switch or amplify the electric current by a factor of 10.They use an external magnetic field to change the magnetic state of the material, switching the transistor using significantly less energy than would usually be required.The material also allows them to control the magnetic states with electric current. This is important because engineers cannot apply magnetic fields to individual transistors in an electronic device. They need to control each one electrically.The material’s magnetic properties could also enable transistors with built-in memory, simplifying the design of logic or memory circuits.A typical memory device has a magnetic cell to store information and a transistor to read it out. Their method can combine both into one magnetic transistor.“Now, not only are transistors turning on and off, they are also remembering information. And because we can switch the transistor with greater magnitude, the signal is much stronger so we can read out the information faster, and in a much more reliable way,” Liu says.Building on this demonstration, the researchers plan to further study the use of electrical current to control the device. They are also working to make their method scalable so they can fabricate arrays of transistors.This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. The work was partially carried out at the MIT.nano facilities. More

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      New method could monitor corrosion and cracking in a nuclear reactor

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      MIT researchers have developed a technique that enables real-time, 3D monitoring of corrosion, cracking, and other material failure processes inside a nuclear reactor environment.This could allow engineers and scientists to design safer nuclear reactors that also deliver higher performance for applications like electricity generation and naval vessel propulsion.During their experiments, the researchers utilized extremely powerful X-rays to mimic the behavior of neutrons interacting with a material inside a nuclear reactor.They found that adding a buffer layer of silicon dioxide between the material and its substrate, and keeping the material under the X-ray beam for a longer period of time, improves the stability of the sample. This allows for real-time monitoring of material failure processes.By reconstructing 3D image data on the structure of a material as it fails, researchers could design more resilient materials that can better withstand the stress caused by irradiation inside a nuclear reactor.“If we can improve materials for a nuclear reactor, it means we can extend the life of that reactor. It also means the materials will take longer to fail, so we can get more use out of a nuclear reactor than we do now. The technique we’ve demonstrated here allows to push the boundary in understanding how materials fail in real-time,” says Ericmoore Jossou, who has shared appointments in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), where he is the John Clark Hardwick Professor, and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.Jossou, senior author of a study on this technique, is joined on the paper by lead author David Simonne, an NSE postdoc; Riley Hultquist, a graduate student in NSE; Jiangtao Zhao, of the European Synchrotron; and Andrea Resta, of Synchrotron SOLEIL. The research was published Tuesday by the journal Scripta Materiala.“Only with this technique can we measure strain with a nanoscale resolution during corrosion processes. Our goal is to bring such novel ideas to the nuclear science community while using synchrotrons both as an X-ray probe and radiation source,” adds Simonne.Real-time imagingStudying real-time failure of materials used in advanced nuclear reactors has long been a goal of Jossou’s research group.Usually, researchers can only learn about such material failures after the fact, by removing the material from its environment and imaging it with a high-resolution instrument.“We are interested in watching the process as it happens. If we can do that, we can follow the material from beginning to end and see when and how it fails. That helps us understand a material much better,” he says.They simulate the process by firing an extremely focused X-ray beam at a sample to mimic the environment inside a nuclear reactor. The researchers must use a special type of high-intensity X-ray, which is only found in a handful of experimental facilities worldwide.For these experiments they studied nickel, a material incorporated into alloys that are commonly used in advanced nuclear reactors. But before they could start the X-ray equipment, they had to prepare a sample.To do this, the researchers used a process called solid state dewetting, which involves putting a thin film of the material onto a substrate and heating it to an extremely high temperature in a furnace until it transforms into single crystals.“We thought making the samples was going to be a walk in the park, but it wasn’t,” Jossou says.As the nickel heated up, it interacted with the silicon substrate and formed a new chemical compound, essentially derailing the entire experiment. After much trial-and-error, the researchers found that adding a thin layer of silicon dioxide between the nickel and substrate prevented this reaction.But when crystals formed on top of the buffer layer, they were highly strained. This means the individual atoms had moved slightly to new positions, causing distortions in the crystal structure.Phase retrieval algorithms can typically recover the 3D size and shape of a crystal in real-time, but if there is too much strain in the material, the algorithms will fail.However, the team was surprised to find that keeping the X-ray beam trained on the sample for a longer period of time caused the strain to slowly relax, due to the silicon buffer layer. After a few extra minutes of X-rays, the sample was stable enough that they could utilize phase retrieval algorithms to accurately recover the 3D shape and size of the crystal.“No one had been able to do that before. Now that we can make this crystal, we can image electrochemical processes like corrosion in real time, watching the crystal fail in 3D under conditions that are very similar to inside a nuclear reactor. This has far-reaching impacts,” he says.They experimented with a different substrate, such as niobium doped strontium titanate, and found that only a silicon dioxide buffered silicon wafer created this unique effect.An unexpected resultAs they fine-tuned the experiment, the researchers discovered something else.They could also use the X-ray beam to precisely control the amount of strain in the material, which could have implications for the development of microelectronics.In the microelectronics community, engineers often introduce strain to deform a material’s crystal structure in a way that boosts its electrical or optical properties.“With our technique, engineers can use X-rays to tune the strain in microelectronics while they are manufacturing them. While this was not our goal with these experiments, it is like getting two results for the price of one,” he adds.In the future, the researchers want to apply this technique to more complex materials like steel and other metal alloys used in nuclear reactors and aerospace applications. They also want to see how changing the thickness of the silicon dioxide buffer layer impacts their ability to control the strain in a crystal sample.“This discovery is significant for two reasons. First, it provides fundamental insight into how nanoscale materials respond to radiation — a question of growing importance for energy technologies, microelectronics, and quantum materials. Second, it highlights the critical role of the substrate in strain relaxation, showing that the supporting surface can determine whether particles retain or release strain when exposed to focused X-ray beams,” says Edwin Fohtung, an associate professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who was not involved with this work.This work was funded, in part, by the MIT Faculty Startup Fund and the U.S. Department of Energy. The sample preparation was carried out, in part, at the MIT.nano facilities. More

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      MIT gears up to transform manufacturing

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      “Manufacturing is the engine of society, and it is the backbone of robust, resilient economies,” says John Hart, head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) and faculty co-director of the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM). “With manufacturing a lively topic in today’s news, there’s a renewed appreciation and understanding of the importance of manufacturing to innovation, to economic and national security, and to daily lives.”Launched this May, INM will “help create a transformation of manufacturing through new technology, through development of talent, and through an understanding of how to scale manufacturing in a way that enables imparts higher productivity and resilience, drives adoption of new technologies, and creates good jobs,” Hart says.INM is one of MIT’s strategic initiatives and builds on the successful three-year-old Manufacturing@MIT program. “It’s a recognition by MIT that manufacturing is an Institute-wide theme and an Institute-wide priority, and that manufacturing connects faculty and students across campus,” says Hart. Alongside Hart, INM’s faculty co-directors are Institute Professor Suzanne Berger and Chris Love, professor of chemical engineering.The initiative is pursuing four main themes: reimagining manufacturing technologies and systems, elevating the productivity and human experience of manufacturing, scaling up new manufacturing, and transforming the manufacturing base.Breaking manufacturing barriers for corporationsAmgen, Autodesk, Flex, GE Vernova, PTC, Sanofi, and Siemens are founding members of INM’s industry consortium. These industry partners will work closely with MIT faculty, researchers, and students across many aspects of manufacturing-related research, both in broad-scale initiatives and in particular areas of shared interests. Membership requires a minimum three-year commitment of $500,000 a year to manufacturing-related activities at MIT, including the INM membership fee of $275,000 per year, which supports several core activities that engage the industry members.One major thrust for INM industry collaboration is the deployment and adoption of AI and automation in manufacturing. This effort will include seed research projects at MIT, collaborative case studies, and shared strategy development.INM also offers companies participation in the MIT-wide New Manufacturing Research effort, which is studying the trajectories of specific manufacturing industries and examining cross-cutting themes such as technology and financing.Additionally, INM will concentrate on education for all professions in manufacturing, with alliances bringing together corporations, community colleges, government agencies, and other partners. “We’ll scale our curriculum to broader audiences, from aspiring manufacturing workers and aspiring production line supervisors all the way up to engineers and executives,” says Hart.In workforce training, INM will collaborate with companies broadly to help understand the challenges and frame its overall workforce agenda, and with individual firms on specific challenges, such as acquiring suitably prepared employees for a new factory.Importantly, industry partners will also engage directly with students. Founding member Flex, for instance, hosted MIT researchers and students at the Flex Institute of Technology in Sorocaba, Brazil, developing new solutions for electronics manufacturing.“History shows that you need to innovate in manufacturing alongside the innovation in products,” Hart comments. “At MIT, as more students take classes in manufacturing, they’ll think more about key manufacturing issues as they decide what research problems they want to solve, or what choices they make as they prototype their devices. The same is true for industry — companies that operate at the frontier of manufacturing, whether through internal capabilities or their supply chains, are positioned to be on the frontier of product innovation and overall growth.”“We’ll have an opportunity to bring manufacturing upstream to the early stage of research, designing new processes and new devices with scalability in mind,” he says.Additionally, MIT expects to open new manufacturing-related labs and to further broaden cooperation with industry at existing shared facilities, such as MIT.nano. Hart says that facilities will also invite tighter collaborations with corporations — not just providing advanced equipment, but working jointly on, say, new technologies for weaving textiles, or speeding up battery manufacturing.Homing in on the United StatesINM is a global project that brings a particular focus on the United States, which remains the world’s second-largest manufacturing economy, but has suffered a significant decline in manufacturing employment and innovation.One key to reversing this trend and reinvigorating the U.S. manufacturing base is advocacy for manufacturing’s critical role in society and the career opportunities it offers.“No one really disputes the importance of manufacturing,” Hart says. “But we need to elevate interest in manufacturing as a rewarding career, from the production workers to manufacturing engineers and leaders, through advocacy, education programs, and buy-in from industry, government, and academia.”MIT is in a unique position to convene industry, academic, and government stakeholders in manufacturing to work together on this vital issue, he points out.Moreover, in times of radical and rapid changes in manufacturing, “we need to focus on deploying new technologies into factories and supply chains,” Hart says. “Technology is not all of the solution, but for the U.S. to expand our manufacturing base, we need to do it with technology as a key enabler, embracing companies of all sizes, including small and medium enterprises.”“As AI becomes more capable, and automation becomes more flexible and more available, these are key building blocks upon which you can address manufacturing challenges,” he says. “AI and automation offer new accelerated ways to develop, deploy, and monitor production processes, which present a huge opportunity and, in some cases, a necessity.”“While manufacturing is always a combination of old technology, new technology, established practice, and new ways of thinking, digital technology gives manufacturers an opportunity to leapfrog competitors,” Hart says. “That’s very, very powerful for the U.S. and any company, or country, that aims to create differentiated capabilities.”Fortunately, in recent years, investors have increasingly bought into new manufacturing in the United States. “They see the opportunity to re-industrialize, to build the factories and production systems of the future,” Hart says.“That said, building new manufacturing is capital-intensive, and takes time,” he adds. “So that’s another area where it’s important to convene stakeholders and to think about how startups and growth-stage companies build their capital portfolios, how large industry can support an ecosystem of small businesses and young companies, and how to develop talent to support those growing companies.”All these concerns and opportunities in the manufacturing ecosystem play to MIT’s strengths. “MIT’s DNA of cross-disciplinary collaboration and working with industry can let us create a lot of impact,” Hart emphasizes. “We can understand the practical challenges. We can also explore breakthrough ideas in research and cultivate successful outcomes, all the way to new companies and partnerships. Sometimes those are seen as disparate approaches, but we like to bring them together.” More

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      Creeping crystals: Scientists observe “salt creep” at the single-crystal scale

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      Salt creeping, a phenomenon that occurs in both natural and industrial processes, describes the collection and migration of salt crystals from evaporating solutions onto surfaces. Once they start collecting, the crystals climb, spreading away from the solution. This creeping behavior, according to researchers, can cause damage or be harnessed for good, depending on the context. New research published June 30 in the journal Langmuir is the first to show salt creeping at a single-crystal scale and beneath a liquid’s meniscus.“The work not only explains how salt creeping begins, but why it begins and when it does,” says Joseph Phelim Mooney, a postdoc in the MIT Device Research Laboratory and one of the authors of the new study. “We hope this level of insight helps others, whether they’re tackling water scarcity, preserving ancient murals, or designing longer-lasting infrastructure.”The work is the first to directly visualize how salt crystals grow and interact with surfaces underneath a liquid meniscus, something that’s been theorized for decades but never actually imaged or confirmed at this level, and it offers fundamental insights that could impact a wide range of fields — from mineral extraction and desalination to anti-fouling coatings, membrane design for separation science, and even art conservation, where salt damage is a major threat to heritage materials.In civil engineering applications, for example, the research can help explain why and when salt crystals start growing across surfaces like concrete, stone, or building materials. “These crystals can exert pressure and cause cracking or flaking, reducing the long-term durability of structures,” says Mooney. “By pinpointing the moment when salt begins to creep, engineers can better design protective coatings or drainage systems to prevent this form of degradation.”For a field like art conservation, where salt can be devastating to murals, frescoes, and ancient artifacts, often forming beneath the surface before visible damage appears, the work can help identify the exact conditions that cause salt to start moving and spreading, allowing conservators to act earlier and more precisely to protect heritage objects.The work began during Mooney’s Marie Curie Fellowship at MIT. “I was focused on improving desalination systems and quickly ran into [salt buildup as] a major roadblock,” he says. “[Salt] was everywhere, coating surfaces, clogging flow paths, and undermining the efficiency of our designs. I realized we didn’t fully understand how or why salt starts creeping across surfaces in the first place.”That experience led Mooney to team up with colleagues to dig into the fundamentals of salt crystallization at the air–liquid–solid interface. “We wanted to zoom in, to really see the moment salt begins to move, so we turned to in situ X-ray microscopy,” he says. “What we found gave us a whole new way to think about surface fouling, material degradation, and controlled crystallization.”The new research may, in fact, allow better control of a crystallization processes required to remove salt from water in zero-liquid discharge systems. It can also be used to explain how and when scaling happens on equipment surfaces, and may support emerging climate technologies that depend on smart control of evaporation and crystallization.The work also supports mineral and salt extraction applications, where salt creeping can be both a bottleneck and an opportunity. In these applications, Mooney says, “by understanding the precise physics of salt formation at surfaces, operators can optimize crystal growth, improving recovery rates and reducing material losses.”Mooney’s co-authors on the paper include fellow MIT Device Lab researchers Omer Refet Caylan, Bachir El Fil (now an associate professor at Georgia Tech), and Lenan Zhang (now an associate professor at Cornell University); Jeff Punch and Vanessa Egan of the University of Limerick; and Jintong Gao of Cornell.The research was conducted using in situ X-ray microscopy. Mooney says the team’s big realization moment occurred when they were able to observe a single salt crystal pinning itself to the surface, which kicked off a cascading chain reaction of growth.“People had speculated about this, but we captured it on X-ray for the first time. It felt like watching the microscopic moment where everything tips, the ignition points of a self-propagating process,” says Mooney. “Even more surprising was what followed: The salt crystal didn’t just grow passively to fill the available space. It pierced through the liquid-air interface and reshaped the meniscus itself, setting up the perfect conditions for the next crystal. That subtle, recursive mechanism had never been visually documented before — and seeing it play out in real time completely changed how we thought about salt crystallization.”The paper, “In Situ X-ray Microscopy Unraveling the Onset of Salt Creeping at a Single-Crystal Level,” is available now in the journal Langmuir. Research was conducted in MIT.nano.  More

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      New fuel cell could enable electric aviation

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      Batteries are nearing their limits in terms of how much power they can store for a given weight. That’s a serious obstacle for energy innovation and the search for new ways to power airplanes, trains, and ships. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have come up with a solution that could help electrify these transportation systems.Instead of a battery, the new concept is a kind of fuel cell — which is similar to a battery but can be quickly refueled rather than recharged. In this case, the fuel is liquid sodium metal, an inexpensive and widely available commodity. The other side of the cell is just ordinary air, which serves as a source of oxygen atoms. In between, a layer of solid ceramic material serves as the electrolyte, allowing sodium ions to pass freely through, and a porous air-facing electrode helps the sodium to chemically react with oxygen and produce electricity.In a series of experiments with a prototype device, the researchers demonstrated that this cell could carry more than three times as much energy per unit of weight as the lithium-ion batteries used in virtually all electric vehicles today. Their findings are being published today in the journal Joule, in a paper by MIT doctoral students Karen Sugano, Sunil Mair, and Saahir Ganti-Agrawal; professor of materials science and engineering Yet-Ming Chiang; and five others.“We expect people to think that this is a totally crazy idea,” says Chiang, who is the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics. “If they didn’t, I’d be a bit disappointed because if people don’t think something is totally crazy at first, it probably isn’t going to be that revolutionary.”And this technology does appear to have the potential to be quite revolutionary, he suggests. In particular, for aviation, where weight is especially crucial, such an improvement in energy density could be the breakthrough that finally makes electrically powered flight practical at significant scale.“The threshold that you really need for realistic electric aviation is about 1,000 watt-hours per kilogram,” Chiang says. Today’s electric vehicle lithium-ion batteries top out at about 300 watt-hours per kilogram — nowhere near what’s needed. Even at 1,000 watt-hours per kilogram, he says, that wouldn’t be enough to enable transcontinental or trans-Atlantic flights.That’s still beyond reach for any known battery chemistry, but Chiang says that getting to 1,000 watts per kilogram would be an enabling technology for regional electric aviation, which accounts for about 80 percent of domestic flights and 30 percent of the emissions from aviation.The technology could be an enabler for other sectors as well, including marine and rail transportation. “They all require very high energy density, and they all require low cost,” he says. “And that’s what attracted us to sodium metal.”A great deal of research has gone into developing lithium-air or sodium-air batteries over the last three decades, but it has been hard to make them fully rechargeable. “People have been aware of the energy density you could get with metal-air batteries for a very long time, and it’s been hugely attractive, but it’s just never been realized in practice,” Chiang says.By using the same basic electrochemical concept, only making it a fuel cell instead of a battery, the researchers were able to get the advantages of the high energy density in a practical form. Unlike a battery, whose materials are assembled once and sealed in a container, with a fuel cell the energy-carrying materials go in and out.The team produced two different versions of a lab-scale prototype of the system. In one, called an H cell, two vertical glass tubes are connected by a tube across the middle, which contains a solid ceramic electrolyte material and a porous air electrode. Liquid sodium metal fills the tube on one side, and air flows through the other, providing the oxygen for the electrochemical reaction at the center, which ends up gradually consuming the sodium fuel. The other prototype uses a horizontal design, with a tray of the electrolyte material holding the liquid sodium fuel. The porous air electrode, which facilitates the reaction, is affixed to the bottom of the tray. Tests using an air stream with a carefully controlled humidity level produced a level of more than 1,500 watt-hours per kilogram at the level of an individual “stack,” which would translate to over 1,000 watt-hours at the full system level, Chiang says.The researchers envision that to use this system in an aircraft, fuel packs containing stacks of cells, like racks of food trays in a cafeteria, would be inserted into the fuel cells; the sodium metal inside these packs gets chemically transformed as it provides the power. A stream of its chemical byproduct is given off, and in the case of aircraft this would be emitted out the back, not unlike the exhaust from a jet engine.But there’s a very big difference: There would be no carbon dioxide emissions. Instead the emissions, consisting of sodium oxide, would actually soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This compound would quickly combine with moisture in the air to make sodium hydroxide — a material commonly used as a drain cleaner — which readily combines with carbon dioxide to form a solid material, sodium carbonate, which in turn forms sodium bicarbonate, otherwise known as baking soda.“There’s this natural cascade of reactions that happens when you start with sodium metal,” Chiang says. “It’s all spontaneous. We don’t have to do anything to make it happen, we just have to fly the airplane.”As an added benefit, if the final product, the sodium bicarbonate, ends up in the ocean, it could help to de-acidify the water, countering another of the damaging effects of greenhouse gases.Using sodium hydroxide to capture carbon dioxide has been proposed as a way of mitigating carbon emissions, but on its own, it’s not an economic solution because the compound is too expensive. “But here, it’s a byproduct,” Chiang explains, so it’s essentially free, producing environmental benefits at no cost.Importantly, the new fuel cell is inherently safer than many other batteries, he says. Sodium metal is extremely reactive and must be well-protected. As with lithium batteries, sodium can spontaneously ignite if exposed to moisture. “Whenever you have a very high energy density battery, safety is always a concern, because if there’s a rupture of the membrane that separates the two reactants, you can have a runaway reaction,” Chiang says. But in this fuel cell, one side is just air, “which is dilute and limited. So you don’t have two concentrated reactants right next to each other. If you’re pushing for really, really high energy density, you’d rather have a fuel cell than a battery for safety reasons.”While the device so far exists only as a small, single-cell prototype, Chiang says the system should be quite straightforward to scale up to practical sizes for commercialization. Members of the research team have already formed a company, Propel Aero, to develop the technology. The company is currently housed in MIT’s startup incubator, The Engine.Producing enough sodium metal to enable widespread, full-scale global implementation of this technology should be practical, since the material has been produced at large scale before. When leaded gasoline was the norm, before it was phased out, sodium metal was used to make the tetraethyl lead used as an additive, and it was being produced in the U.S. at a capacity of 200,000 tons a year. “It reminds us that sodium metal was once produced at large scale and safely handled and distributed around the U.S.,” Chiang says.What’s more, sodium primarily originates from sodium chloride, or salt, so it is abundant, widely distributed around the world, and easily extracted, unlike lithium and other materials used in today’s EV batteries.The system they envisage would use a refillable cartridge, which would be filled with liquid sodium metal and sealed. When it’s depleted, it would be returned to a refilling station and loaded with fresh sodium. Sodium melts at 98 degrees Celsius, just below the boiling point of water, so it is easy to heat to the melting point to refuel the cartridges.Initially, the plan is to produce a brick-sized fuel cell that can deliver about 1,000 watt-hours of energy, enough to power a large drone, in order to prove the concept in a practical form that could be used for agriculture, for example. The team hopes to have such a demonstration ready within the next year.Sugano, who conducted much of the experimental work as part of her doctoral thesis and will now work at the startup, says that a key insight was the importance of moisture in the process. As she tested the device with pure oxygen, and then with air, she found that the amount of humidity in the air was crucial to making the electrochemical reaction efficient. The humid air resulted in the sodium producing its discharge products in liquid rather than solid form, making it much easier for these to be removed by the flow of air through the system. “The key was that we can form this liquid discharge product and remove it easily, as opposed to the solid discharge that would form in dry conditions,” she says.Ganti-Agrawal notes that the team drew from a variety of different engineering subfields. For example, there has been much research on high-temperature sodium, but none with a system with controlled humidity. “We’re pulling from fuel cell research in terms of designing our electrode, we’re pulling from older high-temperature battery research as well as some nascent sodium-air battery research, and kind of mushing it together,” which led to the “the big bump in performance” the team has achieved, he says.The research team also included Alden Friesen, an MIT summer intern who attends Desert Mountain High School in Scottsdale, Arizona; Kailash Raman and William Woodford of Form Energy in Somerville, Massachusetts; Shashank Sripad of And Battery Aero in California, and Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan of the University of Michigan. The work was supported by ARPA-E, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and the National Science Foundation, and used facilities at MIT.nano. More

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      How to solve a bottleneck for CO2 capture and conversion

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      Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere efficiently is often seen as a crucial need for combatting climate change, but systems for removing carbon dioxide suffer from a tradeoff. Chemical compounds that efficiently remove CO₂ from the air do not easily release it once captured, and compounds that release CO₂ efficiently are not very efficient at capturing it. Optimizing one part of the cycle tends to make the other part worse.Now, using nanoscale filtering membranes, researchers at MIT have added a simple intermediate step that facilitates both parts of the cycle. The new approach could improve the efficiency of electrochemical carbon dioxide capture and release by six times and cut costs by at least 20 percent, they say.The new findings are reported today in the journal ACS Energy Letters, in a paper by MIT doctoral students Simon Rufer, Tal Joseph, and Zara Aamer, and professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.“We need to think about scale from the get-go when it comes to carbon capture, as making a meaningful impact requires processing gigatons of CO₂,” says Varanasi. “Having this mindset helps us pinpoint critical bottlenecks and design innovative solutions with real potential for impact. That’s the driving force behind our work.”Many carbon-capture systems work using chemicals called hydroxides, which readily combine with carbon dioxide to form carbonate. That carbonate is fed into an electrochemical cell, where the carbonate reacts with an acid to form water and release carbon dioxide. The process can take ordinary air with only about 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide and generate a stream of 100 percent pure carbon dioxide, which can then be used to make fuels or other products.Both the capture and release steps operate in the same water-based solution, but the first step needs a solution with a high concentration of hydroxide ions, and the second step needs one high in carbonate ions. “You can see how these two steps are at odds,” says Varanasi. “These two systems are circulating the same sorbent back and forth. They’re operating on the exact same liquid. But because they need two different types of liquids to operate optimally, it’s impossible to operate both systems at their most efficient points.”The team’s solution was to decouple the two parts of the system and introduce a third part in between. Essentially, after the hydroxide in the first step has been mostly chemically converted to carbonate, special nanofiltration membranes then separate ions in the solution based on their charge. Carbonate ions have a charge of 2, while hydroxide ions have a charge of 1. “The nanofiltration is able to separate these two pretty well,” Rufer says.Once separated, the hydroxide ions are fed back to the absorption side of the system, while the carbonates are sent ahead to the electrochemical release stage. That way, both ends of the system can operate at their more efficient ranges. Varanasi explains that in the electrochemical release step, protons are being added to the carbonate to cause the conversion to carbon dioxide and water, but if hydroxide ions are also present, the protons will react with those ions instead, producing just water.“If you don’t separate these hydroxides and carbonates,” Rufer says, “the way the system fails is you’ll add protons to hydroxide instead of carbonate, and so you’ll just be making water rather than extracting carbon dioxide. That’s where the efficiency is lost. Using nanofiltration to prevent this was something that we aren’t aware of anyone proposing before.”Testing showed that the nanofiltration could separate the carbonate from the hydroxide solution with about 95 percent efficiency, validating the concept under realistic conditions, Rufer says. The next step was to assess how much of an effect this would have on the overall efficiency and economics of the process. They created a techno-economic model, incorporating electrochemical efficiency, voltage, absorption rate, capital costs, nanofiltration efficiency, and other factors.The analysis showed that present systems cost at least $600 per ton of carbon dioxide captured, while with the nanofiltration component added, that drops to about $450 a ton. What’s more, the new system is much more stable, continuing to operate at high efficiency even under variations in the ion concentrations in the solution. “In the old system without nanofiltration, you’re sort of operating on a knife’s edge,” Rufer says; if the concentration varies even slightly in one direction or the other, efficiency drops off drastically. “But with our nanofiltration system, it kind of acts as a buffer where it becomes a lot more forgiving. You have a much broader operational regime, and you can achieve significantly lower costs.”He adds that this approach could apply not only to the direct air capture systems they studied specifically, but also to point-source systems — which are attached directly to the emissions sources such as power plant emissions — or to the next stage of the process, converting captured carbon dioxide into useful products such as fuel or chemical feedstocks.  Those conversion processes, he says, “are also bottlenecked in this carbonate and hydroxide tradeoff.”In addition, this technology could lead to safer alternative chemistries for carbon capture, Varanasi says. “A lot of these absorbents can at times be toxic, or damaging to the environment. By using a system like ours, you can improve the reaction rate, so you can choose chemistries that might not have the best absorption rate initially but can be improved to enable safety.”Varanasi adds that “the really nice thing about this is we’ve been able to do this with what’s commercially available,” and with a system that can easily be retrofitted to existing carbon-capture installations. If the costs can be further brought down to about $200 a ton, it could be viable for widespread adoption. With ongoing work, he says, “we’re confident that we’ll have something that can become economically viable” and that will ultimately produce valuable, saleable products.Rufer notes that even today, “people are buying carbon credits at a cost of over $500 per ton. So, at this cost we’re projecting, it is already commercially viable in that there are some buyers who are willing to pay that price.” But by bringing the price down further, that should increase the number of buyers who would consider buying the credit, he says. “It’s just a question of how widespread we can make it.” Recognizing this growing market demand, Varanasi says, “Our goal is to provide industry scalable, cost-effective, and reliable technologies and systems that enable them to directly meet their decarbonization targets.”The research was supported by Shell International Exploration and Production Inc. through the MIT Energy Initiative, and the U.S. National Science Foundation, and made use of the facilities at MIT.nano. More

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      SLB joins the MIT.nano Consortium

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      SLB, a global company creating technology to address the world’s energy challenges, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration, fostering research and innovation in nanoscale science and engineering.“The addition of SLB to the MIT.nano Consortium represents a powerful synergy between academic innovation and leading industry,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Masseh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies at MIT. “SLB’s expertise in developing energy technologies and its commitment to decarbonization aligns with MIT‘s mission to address the many challenges of climate change. Their addition to the consortium, and collaborations that will follow, will empower the MIT.nano community to advance critical research in this domain.”For 100 years, SLB has developed strategies and systems to unlock access to energy beneath the Earth’s surface. The company’s founder, Conrad Schlumberger, conceived the idea of using electrical measurements to map subsurface rock bodies back in 1912. Since then, SLB has continued to open new fronts in energy exploration—innovating in oil and gas, scaling new technologies, and designing digital solutions. Applying decades of innovation in science and engineering, SLB has committed to accelerating the decarbonization of the energy sector and supporting the global transition to low-carbon energy systems.With more than 900 facilities in over 120 countries, SLB adds to the global industry perspective of the MIT.nano Consortium and the broader MIT research community.“Taking a nanoscale approach to the scientific and technological challenges we face in the decarbonization domains is an endeavor that SLB is excited to embark on with MIT.nano,” says Smaine Zeroug, SLB research director and ambassador to MIT. “We are confident our engagement with MIT.nano and the extensive research network they offer access to will ultimately lead to field-viable solutions.”SLB has a longstanding relationship with MIT. The company, formerly named Schlumberger, donated specialized software to the MIT Seismic Visualization Laboratory in 1999 to enable MIT researchers and students to use three-dimensional seismic data in their studies of the Earth’s upper crust. SLB is also a current member of the MIT CSAIL Alliances.As a member of the MIT.nano consortium, SLB will gain unparalleled access to MIT.nano’s dynamic user community, providing opportunities to share expertise and guide advances in nanoscale technology.MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For details, and to see a list of current members, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page. More