Mother of two develops innovative new fuel cell technology
Sun Mar 02, 2008 at 09:02:18 AM PDT
Admittedly, that's not the headline most media have chosen to go with.
(What is this, news for parrots?)
Still, I think it's valuable to remember that one can be a mother and still be other things. (Especially since we have talked often here about how unfriendly academia can be to mothers.)
Sossina Haile, a professor of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering at Caltech, was featured recently in Newsweek as one of the "Who's Next 2008." Her group has been working on fuel cells since the late '90s, and has an idea for solid acid fuel cells. Two of her grad students have created a company, Superprotonic, to commercialize the technology.
A fuel cell is a device for converting chemical energy into electricity - basically a battery that can be refueled (like a combustion engine) rather than only recharged. This is convenient because then you can build electric cars that can be quickly refilled with fuel, as we do now, rather than forcing a battery change-out or a long plug-in recharge. Current fuel cells work, but there are issues. They're expensive, among other reasons because of their use of platinum, and their temperature ranges are inconvenient - either too low, requiring cooling, or too high, requiring special and expensive high heat materials and engineering. Dr. Haile's solution uses Cesium Hydrogen Sulfate, and wants a temperature range right in line with an automobile's operating temperature.
Dr. Haile was a refugee from Ethiopia and attended MIT for her undergraduate and graduate study. She joined the faculty at Caltech in 1996 - I am sure in part because of their efforts to seek female and minority faculty members. I remember the days when there was an attitude when doing such was surely detrimental to the overall output of the Institute. I find it especially pleasing to see a young female professor with children becoming one of the faculty stars.
Haile's work, dovetailing with that of her colleagues in materials science and chemical engineering, is to look at the big picture of the energy cycle - generation, storage, distribution, and usage - and to find interdisciplinary solutions that can meet these needs on a large scale for the nation and the world.
Haile says that society should look toward new possibilities for the future in terms of energy technology rather than scrambling at the last minute when existing options become scarce. "There's an anonymous quote that the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones," she says.
"In the fuel-cell portion of the work, we focus on efficient conversion of chemical energy to electricity. And by designing fuel cells that are not restricted to hydrogen as the fuel, we relax the requirement that the world develop a hydrogen storage and delivery infrastructure before the many benefits of fuel cells can be realized."
The sun is a logical source for energy - and truly, is the only source that provides enough power, indefinitely, to meet our projected needs. How can we harness it affordably on the necessary scale? Haile is part of a new initiative at Caltech, the Center for Sustainable Energy Research, that combines a cross-disciplinary group of researchers to attack the problem from several directions.
Powering the Planet: The Caltech Center for Sustainable Energy Research (PDF)
Nate Lewis: The problem with energy, really, is that people who experience it everyday don't experience it on the scale that we need to produce it. They don't experience the fact, that over the next 40 years, if you want to avoid even a doubling of carbon dioxide, after accounting for population growth and economic growth, you have to build the equivalent of a new nuclear power plant every day for 38 straight years. So all of a sudden, most of the "solutions" are not solutions when you consider the needed scale.
Sossina Haile: When you start thinking about energy on a global level, you start thinking about all the ways in which the Earth is resource limited. When you start really thinking about global solutions, all of a sudden those material resources become a real problem. And along those lines, platinum is one that people are starting to think about in terms of fuel-cell catalysts or electrolysis catalysts. There will not be enough platinum.
And so Caltech is working on making the price of platinum plummet (to paraphrase Harry Atwater) by working on fuel cell technologies that can use more plentiful catalysts - cobalt, nickel, iron.
Harry Atwater: The things you have to do well - efficiently, and with abundant materials - are: absorb the light, convert the light into an electrochemical potential that's sufficient to split water (into its hydrogen and oxygen components), and then you have to catalyze hydrogen evolution from water by electrolysis.
These new fuel cell materials are very promising, and I wish Haile's group much success in developing and commercializing the technology. I hope her kids are proud.
P.S. I was pleased to discover that the Gordon and Betty Moore foundation is supporting much of this work. Moore is the former chairman of Intel and is the Moore of Moore's law, which says that affordable computing power increases exponentially, with the number of transistors that can be placed affordably on an integrated circuit roughly doubling every two years. I foolishly hope that by investing millions of dollars in energy research, a little of the karma of Moore's law will rub off on energy technology. On a personal note/disclaimer, the Moores also funded one of my scholarships, for which I will always be grateful.
Articles:
Fuel Cells - a basic discussion of the technology written by Haile in 2001
Science, Newcomer heats up the race for practical fuel cells (pdf)
Powering Progress in the 21st Century (pdf)
Swiss Rolls and Oreo Cookies (pdf)
Hear her lecture on the technology (RealAudio).
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